


Of the Rings of Power and the Burning of Hithlum:

by TheLightdancer



Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [7]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Celebrimbor Has Issues, Celebrimbor Makes Bad Life Choices, Elf Culture & Customs, F/M, Ilmare is her own warning, Rings of Power, Second Age, Sort Of, War of the Elves and Sauron, War of the Elves and Sauron's AU Counterpart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:33:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 44,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25362433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: The Second Age of Arda has begun. In Hithlum, capital of his kingdom of Lindon, Ereinion Gil-Galad has, in a century, built a new Elven realm that grows from strength to strength. Yet the wounds and the sorrows of the old War of the Jewels are slow in healing, and beyond all else there are shadows. In the ambitions and dreams of the last son of the House of Feanor and the schemes of a sorceress of the people of Valinor with great power are born Rings, great and splendid, that promise to stave off mortality and its effects and bring forth glory anew. Yet in the presence of this Aurelian of Valinor, fell deeds are woven and the doomsday clock ticks on the last of the Elf-Kings fair and free, between the mountains and the sea.
Relationships: Celeborn/Galadriel | Artanis, Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Galadriel | Artanis, Celebrían/Elrond Peredhel, Elrond Peredhel & Elros Tar-Minyatur, Ereinion Gil-galad/Original Female Character(s)
Series: The War of the Jewels Against the Elder Queen of the Stars [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1804138
Kudos: 6





	1. Prologue: In the House of Gil-Galad

S.A. 100, HITHLUM, CAPITAL OF LINDON:

Ereinion, son of Fingon, High King of the Noldor stood from his window near his Throneroom. A century had he labored to rebuild a new kingdom of the Noldor, to bring Elven culture back to the heights from which it had fallen. Too well did the memory endure of the treachery of the children of the eldest son of the House of Finwe, butchery from the blades of the Sons of the Oath, children born of mesalliances between their legions and even great noblewomen of the Noldor and the Sindar alike. The wounds therein were bitter, and Oropher of the Greenwood with his wife and his son had withdrawn, finding it improbable to tolerate or to welcome Noldor presence. Other Sindar were less waryyet , and of the Avari in the South, wearied by the bitterness of the great war, there had come unlooked for and unsought yet welcome replenishment of the ranks of his people. 

A century had he labored and in the eyes of a deathless people, a century was a time blessedly short. Mighty deeds had been done, forests hewn and stone worked, and a city erected in memory of the Forbidden Lands to the West, yet the more fair and the more lovely for being in what to them were the Great Lands of the East, unknown and unsung. To the south Galadriel, also of their house, and daughter of his father's brother, had become Queen in power, though not yet fully in name. Hers was the realm of Eregion, fair and lovely and where she, alone among the Noldor, had the unreserved faith and affection of the Sindar. Great was her love for Teleporno, to his people Celeborn, and from that love had come three children. Two daughters and a son, though the son was distant to his people and a great friend to Men and even to the stunted folk, the Naugrim of Khazad-Dum, mightiest of all their lands.

She was coming to his realm on its centennial, as hers had reached seventy-five years, and in that time had wrought beauty and the spreading of Mallorn-Forests that would endure and replenish in the times to come, when the Burning and the wrath of that which lurked in the outer light gleaming with its terrible drone revealed itself. With her came Kemenrond of the Peredhil, the great loremaster. No doubt, he reflected with a small sigh, Artanis would badger him about one of her hopes. That Rivendell, Imladris, become a realm in itself, removed and yet linked to Eregion. No matter what she said, he could not bring himself to trust fully any with the blood of Melian in them.

He had seen and heard the truth, that of Melian's lineage there was that line of the Ainur of the people of the Fallen, thrust beyond the Doors. Nothing of star-blood could be truly trusted nor clean, and yet......Imladris was but new and a realm as fair as his own and that without any unhallowed traces.

His nose twitched. Always uneasy lay the head that wore the crown, and he suspected that Kemenrond's young wife, Galadriel's own daughter, would not come with them. A daughter had been born to that line, the very mirror image of Luthien Tinuviel and said to possess more than a share of her power, as if Luthien, so swiftly parted from Arda, had come anew in the way the lords of the Naugrim were said to do. And that was what Galadriel wished to see given a realm of its own? The symbol of the Lords of the West that though his kingdom had reached glory and would come to its noontide of bliss within the next centuries, the most splendid realm since Doriath and Nargothrond in their glories in turn, that the Quendi were fated to go West and to enter sanctity and sustaining power rather than withering into ghosts that spoke in whispers and could slip yea even into the bodies of Men?

Joy there was in this conclave of Elf-Lords and Ladies, yet there was doubt, too. Doubt, fear. The annoyance that Oropher had refused to accept any gathering with Noldor that included one of the sons of the Oathkeepers.

Too, there was the disquiet of the entity calling herself Aurelian, Light-Bearer. As a ghost of Valinor she had arisen in the wake of the war and begun to work wonders and with fair words and deeds and things of mighty splendor become a figure of awe and reverence among Men and even Dwarves. Her eyes were said to glow with the light of Aman, and yet there were other things. A low droning sound that echoed in her presence, the Nightfall in its scabbard ever at her back, if never taken from that scabbard. At times where she went and spoke of mighty things and showed wonders there were screams of nightmare in the small hours of the morning.

It was not improbable given the sheer presence of the Lords of the West that had come to wage war and laid low Beleriand that among their ranks lingered great Maiar that worked to heal the world.

Terrible had the light of the Valar been in those days and the world had shattered amidst great fires and the power of their Song together, an ethereal loveliness that lingered in his mind and where its traces could silence that most fearsome of things, a clear night, where the stars of the Fallen thrummed in hunger and greed. They had wrecked much of the world, it was not beyond them to repair their ravages.

Dawn rose, then, and in the light of Arien, Queen of the Valar, and its bright red traces that seemed to light clouds with a brilliant red hue and the banishment of that power kept at bay by Sindar tricks, the use of music of Vala and Vala-make to banish the Star-Drone, the shadows on his soul parted. The sunlight reflected on the roofs and beauty of his city, that city of Hithlum that would linger in the dreams of Men as the core of the land of fabled Lomar, where the spirits of the Firstborn and of Men endured long past the passage of the last ship from the Havens to the True West.

Fair and splendid were its minarets and the way the Sun caught the gems worked into its roofs and was heralded with the dawn-chorus, Elven voices that sang hymns to the Sun and to the Tree-Queen, whose light had been greater than starlight, and whose boughs protected and endured starlight lest other and more terrible things awaken.

Thousands sang, and in that beauty he smiled, as the heat of the Sun greeted his face.

Beside him his wife had awoken and slipped from her nightgown into a simple dress of resplendent beauty fitting her tastes as Queen, laconic yet not the more beautiful for that, and her hand slipped into his.

Tomorrow's troubles would take care of themselves. For today the great city echoed as Elven beauty undiminished and unchanged by the devastation of the fall of the Old Kingdoms, and that was enough.

The light of Arien made all evil things seem lesser, a pure light though not that which matched the trees and where the dark spots made by the poisoned dagger of the Star-Queen meant now it burned with more heat and now it seemed to dim.

He turned to his wife, Meliwen, and she smiled in turn, the radiance in her eyes undiminished by all that they had seen since the Nirnaeth and the fall of his father and his being sent to Doriath first and then the Mouths. Her spirit was less troubled than he though the crown weighed no less on her brow, and in that radiance of her spirit he laid his head on her shoulder, relishing that sensation, the softness of her dress, the lightness of her laughter. She smiled, then, as another day in the long lifespan of the Quendi began.


	2. Conclave of the Elf-Lords:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Celebrimbor, Kemenrond, Galadriel, and Celeborn all arrive in Hithlum for the conclave. Gil-Galad finds himself struck by the way even the Deathless are not fully immune to change.

SA 100, HITHlLUM, TWO DAYS LATER: 

The time of the conclave had been set to a point where each of the great leaders of the Quendi ould arrive, in fullness. The lord of Imladris and his wife, and their young sons had arrived first. He wore no warlike clothing, nor garments that smacked of some great or overweening pride. Merely a humble tunic and trousers, though belted with finely woven gold. Kemenrond of the lineage of Luthien and the Mariner was a figure who had a greater bulk and heft than most Quendi, for his included the blood of Men, and in him there was a splendor as with all his family greater than any other. Yet, with such a legacy and a brother who was the founder of his own Kingdom over the hill and across the water, he was quiet, keen-eyed. Great power he possessed but neither need nor desire to flaunt it were in him.

Next had arrived she who called herself Lady of Eregion, Artanis, as he called her, Galadriel, as she called herself. Her younger daughter was with her, her elder with her husband, the master of Rivendell. Celeborn, husband of the Lady of Eregion, on her right as her daughter was between them. Galadriel too had arrived in a simple white dress that reflected her splendor, fairest of all Elves of truly Elven blood, and her hair gleamed with the light that had inspired the terrible Jewels of ancient years, save a singular streak of white near her temple that stood out the more with the rest. Celeborn, as with the one who had arrived last, wore armor, elaborate and wrought with work that reflected a master craftsman, but a deliberately warlike posture that reflected, as Gil-Galad stifled a sigh, that he might have guessed entirely wrong about which of them would seek to badger him about what. Celeborn's suspicion and fear of the witch Aurelian was well known, as was his desire to have her locked up and the force of the Valar reached about one of their own.

Celebrimbor too wore armor, and he had arrived last. Celeborn wore his with the wariness and the suspicion of a veteran of many fields, Celebrimbor wore his more casually, fully aware that armor and hostility from a prince of that family would likely go against a great many more designs. Last-arrived, it was Celebrimbor whose servants heralded him with a fanfare, though it was not that of his grandfather but that of his great-grandfather from the old days. Celebrimbor had renounced the deeds of his family, a reason, perhaps the greatest reason, why unlike his uncle Maglor the Accursed he was welcome among these conclaves. As with all his family he had hair of firey red and eyes that shone with a deep wisdom. His bulk was greatest of his family since his uncle, the Jewelmaker, and so too his height.

His countenance, however, reflected the ruddiness of Nerdanel to equal proportion and that too stifled disquiet and murmurs, for where the features of the Jewelmaker were unwelcome in sight, the ruddiness and red hair of Nerdanel, the curve of her cheeks and the precise element of the points of her ears were all far more welcome. So too that after the fanfare Celebrimbor did not strut with the arrogance his family had made vice and very seldom, virtue, but walked with a calm confidence befitting the greatest smith and artificier this side of the Sundering.

First of them he strode to the gates of the Palace, where he bowed stiffly at the waist.

"Hail Gil-Galad, High King of the Noldor! May your reign be long in years and long in glory, that the Quendi endure unchanged until the time of the Second-Born!'

To this he made the polite response with far more warmth and sincerity than he had anticipated.

'Welcome, Celebrimbor, chief of the Forge-Masters of Eregion! May your forge-fires be warm and great things be built to the glory of the Powers of the West and the service of the Quendi!'

Next came a fanfare, silvery and ethereal, a chorus not of Arda but of old Valinor, and no less than one of Alaquonde from before the burning. That was always a surprise to him. Accounted as she was among the Noldor, to Galadriel it was her heritage as one of the Teleri and of the Vanyar that meant equal things in her eyes, if not greater. Part of Ereinion could not be surprised, Noldor heritage had brought her the sorrow of the Kinslayings, suffering more than most. Her son might have spurned the heritage of the Noldor, but in this case the apple had not fallen altogether far from the boughs that brought them forth.

Galadriel and Celeborn strode together, their steps matched. Galadriel's dress was deceptively simple, the purity of white interwoven with cunningly worked gems, her Noldor heritage illustrating itself most in this, the gems setting off the radiance of her hair and the shining blue of her eyes. Celeborn's armor though ornate was a sign of warlike nature, and there were murmurs and disquiet among the people of Hithlum, for the King of Eregion, as he called himself, had not come in friendliness, as was plain. In his eyes there was no warmth, merely a blend of coldness and eagerness to challenge the witch, and yet there was hostility to Celebrimbor that seemed much greater than anything of Celebrimbor's rumored affections to the lady Galadriel could explain.

The last of the Feanorians had come alone, with no sword at his waist, Celeborn came with a small troop of his soldiers and his scabbard at his side, hilt gleaming in the eyes of Arien. To the gates they strode in turn and bowed, Galadriel far less stiffly, Celeborn just at the edge of what propriety required.

It was him who spoke for both of them.

"Hail, Gil-Galad, High King of the Noldor! May your reign be long in years and long in glory, and the Quendi endure unchanged until the time of the Second-Born!"

His tone was cold, as well, but the words were correct, and he spoke the phrase propriety dictated with coldness in turn. Here, to challenge him like this in front of his people? He would have words with the arrogant Sinda and his barbarian horde for this.

Then last came a single silvery peal of notes that were high and splendid, and with a troop of Elves in the robes of scholars adorned with jewel-work came a tall and broad figure with dark hair and eyes that were a bright and stormy grey. Where others had come as King or King-aspirant, Kemenrond and his sons and his wife strode as a family, suited for a life of scholarship and no weapons visible. Gil-Galad knew better, he had seen the foster-son of the Feanorians at work in the sparring range and his were the moves of one trained with skill in swords and not to be dismissed.

He wanted to hate and to feel suspicion to one whose lineage had ties to the tribe of the Fallen, but there could not be it in truth. Celebrimbor and Celeborn had brought murmurs of one kind, Kemenrond brought a silent and even reverent-seeming welcome.

He bowed lowest, in humility, and spoke the words in a perfect intonation and with great warmth, echoed by his wife and his sons.

Where to Celeborn there had been coldness and suspicion, to Kemenrond there was a warmth fully meant and fully welcome, and far more sincere than to the Feanorian prince.

The ceremony of welcome complete, the Lords went into the Palace while their retainers went to taverns and other places to seek entertainment and revelry, all of them intermingling in a peace among the Quendi that had not seen its equal since the days before the Darkening.

He strode to his throneroom, a comfortable distance away from the Elven lords that followed him, thoughts swimming with elements that overlapped in different ways.

Officially Celebrimbor had come for his centennial though he suspected only the Peredhil and Artanis truly came here for that purpose and for that nature.

As his Queen and he took their thrones, they waited for a few minutes, and a herald announced the Conclave had come to the Throneroom, before leaving only the rulers and rulers-aspirant in the vastness of his throneroom and they with them.

It was Celebrimbor who spoke first, bowing to Celeborn, whose hostility faded slightly, or perhaps more than slightly. That had Gil-Galad raising one eyebrow while carefully keeping his lips pursed together.

"The news that I bring is important enough that I deemed it unwise to discuss it without the fairest and wisest of those who remain here" as his gaze turned to Galadriel, "without the great warlord of the Sindar, who fought the first stirrings of the Enemy before we of the Noldor returned in folly" Celeborn nodding stiffly at this "and the loremaster who is greatest of all loremasters this side of the Sundering."

That had Gil-Galad's attention and he leaned forward from his throne.

"The witch Aurelian, who's been going through towns of Elves, Dwarves, and Men as an itinerant healer and worker of great magicks came to Eregion, to the new settlement of Ost-in-Edhil. She sought me, specifically, and brought a concept that as the New Realms begin from cities won from the wilderness and expand outward as those of the Dawn-Time did before them, must be discussed here where walls are safest."

"She promised me something that would speak too keenly to the hearts of Quendi, and to our ambitions. Look around us," as he moved his hands, and the Quendi lords looked around indeed.

"She has promised us a concept that would let us rebuild the glories of the First Age and even enhance them, to, as she put it 'heal the world's wounds such that no realm of the Lords of the West could be fairer.' When a being of such beauty marred by the scabbard of Nightfall on her back makes such promises...."

Gil-Galad nodded. "And what manner of endeavor would promise such a miracle?"

Celebrimbor swallowed, slightly, then continued. "Rings, High King. Rings of Power."

Shadows seemed to swell at that last word and all noticed this.

"Rings? How would a band of metal do such a thing? Even the gemstones of your ancestors but preserved pure light, they did not have a power to dim time."

Kemenrond spoke then, softly. "For a certain definition of dimming, my lord Gil-Galad, they unfortunately very much did. The light of the Silmaril slew my ancestors, for it burned their souls to the Doom of Men as the starlight of the Fallen does in a fashion unholy and unlovely."

They all nodded, accepting that point. "She believes in the methods of Aule the Forge-Kin that there are arts, and enchantments, that can be unleashed. Deeds that even Mairon herald of Melkor the Great-King might conceive upon and look upon with great pleasure."

Gil-Galad mused for a time, the wind blowing softly beyond the palace, as silence fell. Thoughts flowed through his mind as a river, memories of the sight ever so brief of the Silmaril of Beren and Luthien and the madness that overtook the Oathkeepers and their driving him from a home that was home in a way the realm of FIngon had never proven to be.

"What did she seem to you?" His question was wary, an acid edge to it that was not directed at Celebrimbor himself, who acknowledged this with a gaze.

"She is of the Maiar, at least, that much is obvious. She has light in her and of her and it seems fair, yet there is that droning around her presence where it burns too heavily. Kemenrond's ancestor, Melian, whose singing entranced in the past and may yet entrance anew Valinor, had something of that element around her, too. Where her light grew the greater there was droning, if lovely and welcome. She has power, too. What power, I do not know. She has the sword Nightfall but has never drawn it and refers to it as a weapon of a dead kingdom that is safe in no hands but in hers it would take a power greater than most on this side of the Sundering to threaten her and to take it from her."

He paused. "I have seen a few of the villages of the Kingdom of Holly that are growing, as Noldor are becoming numerous enough to leave, where she has strode in to work her wonders. There is light there, of a sort, and a lovely and a radiant one, and the people there are full of health and gratitude for the 'Emissary of the Lords of the West.' Yet I also spoke to one of the Eagles of the Mountains, those of the people of the Seven Winds, and they said there is no such emissary sent, and flew to the West.

I do not know, High King, what manner of witch this Aurelian be, but it is clear that she has power and is using it, at least for now, for the good. The Fallen's monsters are gone, and evil is ended. Or so it is said. Yet to the far east, there are tales from Palantirs of those who have ranged far Amarth has erupted in fire, that one fated to awaken it has come. I know the Avari tales of Amon Amarth and none of them are kindly. They speak of a great and terrible thing of fire that will arise as a 'Ravager of Worlds' with a sword of flame, to come forth and burn the 'works of the Gods of Faerie.'

"if I had to guess, some great evil of the Fallen endures to this day, either her spirit at work through her starlight, or some great servant of hers who was neither slain nor broken and seeks to act as the new image of her malice. But which Fae of the Fallen it is, is beyond my power to guess. I only know which ones it cannot be. The Valaurakar are all destroyed, merciifully, so there can be nothing there to find." 

"A point to that. I do not know what to make of this. Is she still in Ost-in-Edhil?"

Celeborn answered that question. "No, High King. She made the overture to us in our throneroom and then when she did not receive an immediate affirmative, she let, she said, to work further healing in Arda from the ruins of the old war."

Celebrimbor mused. "It seems too good an offer, my lords. Rings that could preserve and even enhance beauty? My family has tarnished the honor of the Quendi enough. I would not take the risk of even broaching the element of such creations without your approval, High King."

Gil-Galad nodded again. "For now, the Rings of Power shall remain a concept and nothing more."

With that the conclave turned to more mundane matters, approval of new settlements, and the degree to which Galadriel and Celeborn were establishing contact with the dwarven realm of Khazad-Dum, then under Thorin Greathammer. Gil-Galad had little use for the Naugrim, finding them a distasteful people even if the Noldor were that kindred of Quendi most friendly to them. Yet Galadriel had spoken more broadly and even animatedly then, praising the splendors of Kibil-Nala and Kheled-Zaram, using the Khuzdul terms. A tongue harsh and guttural in Naugrim mouths was fair in her own.

Too, the idea of Kemenrond's settlement furthest south and west at Ilmadris becoming a lordship of its own was shelved for a time, though Kemenrond confided before them all of the coming of Maglor son of Feanor, and the words spoken on the birth of his daughter, still in Rivendell and under Maglor's own keeping. They were harsh words and ominous, and their combination with that promise of Aurelian meant that Gil-Galad rethought, for a time, the idea that Ilmadris could not be a fuller lordship.

"Whatever force of evil must remain at work would turn to your family if it knew such a prophecy existed. You have my permission, Kemenrond, to govern Ilmadris as a fiefdom if so you should wish, liable only to your rule. No kingly title shall you take, as yet, unless other deeds should change this."

With a look of surprise, Kemenrond bowed his head, and spoke words in homage, kneeling, with Celebrian beside him as he did so.

Business aside, the rest of the conclave lasted four days and was a moment of genuine pleasure, and to his further surprise the words of Celebrimbor had seemingly defused what hostility was there. And yet..... watching Celebrimbor and Artanis carefully he caught moments of longing and strange emotions in his sight.

That boded trouble, for where the House of Feanor felt desire toward Artanis of the Teleri, no good had ever come of it. Yet Celeborn seemed oblivious though how true this was was not certain to him, and the looks were carefully calculated. In this Gil-Galad suddenly appreciated the wisdom of Galadriel insisting on her daughters' company, the sisters seated together slightly away from Kemenrond and his family and yet close enough that whatever lurked in the secret heart and wishes of Celebrimbor was muted.

The days passed and the lords departed, and Ereinion watched them leave with a sense of foreboding. Rings of Power indeed.

A future shadow of grief seemed to deepen as he thought on the prospect of a world made thus, and in the shadows of Arien as she continued to pass through the day, he reflected. To preserve the world in a fuller sense of splendor was impossible under the power of Time, wasn't it?

Doubt, secret and unknown and unspoken even to his own heart crept in then, and stars sang softly in amusement and malice behind the clouds that blocked most of their light and left their voices muffled.


	3. Thorin Greathammer and the Witch of the South:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In one of her many roving visits to the Free Peoples in the dawn of the Second Age, Thorin I Greathammer ponders on the nature of the beings that visited his realm and departed, and on the troubles of the refugees of the Firebeards and the Broadbeams.

KHAZAD-DUM, SA 101:

Thorin I Greathammer, Lord of Khazad-Dum, for all practical purposes High King of all the Dwarves now that the heirs of Nogrod and Belegost had seen their original kingdoms laid waste when the Powers had come, pondered on things. The Firebeards and Broadbeams had come to Khazad-Dum and they had not fit into this region neatly, lords who bellowed and moaned of a lost kingdom even as they told of meeting Mahal himself, who had promised that new halls would be delved for them in the Blue Mountains that were now known to the Khazad as the Mountains of the World's Edge.

Mahal had promised that one of his people would come, and indeed, there had been two strange visitors. One of hair of brilliant red and eyes of brilliant golden hue that gleamed like suns. He had given his name as no less than Mairon, and that had been a moment of awe. Yet another had arrived within days of Mairon's own presence and there was much in all of this to ponder. Aurelian, she called herself, in an old Avari tongue of the far north, a culture that had warred itself to extinction against the monsters of the North long before Sun or Moon. The entity said Aurelian mean 'Light-Bearer' in that tongue, and that might have been convincing to most yet it was the lord of the Firebeards who had objected most harshly, his ginger hair shining beneath the lamps.

"I knew the culture which spoke that word. Aurelian did not mean Light-Bearer, there. It meant 'Light-Kindler', and it was a name of the Fallen."

That had bothered him more than he was willing to admit, and so too did the degree to which she who had spoken of herself as an Emissary of the Powers had reacted to seeing Mairon. As far as he knew, Faerie revered Mairon only less than Eonwe, whose sword of light had cloven the Star-Blooded and whose presence had won the War of the Gods. Eonwe the greater in valor and fighting, Mairon in sorcery. No race in Arda revered the great sorcerer-king and herald of Melkor the Great-King more than the Khazad, for whom Mairon received only little less honor than Mahal himself.

Yet this 'emissary' had reacted with wariness, her words guarded and her promises phrased distinct to the usual affairs. He pondered, as he took a draught of his malt beer, and memory stole into that land betwixt dreaming and waking.

\-------

_Mairon had finally cornered the shining and gleaming entity clad in tunic of bright blue hue and trousers of a silvery sheen._

_**Who are you?** His hand was on her shoulder, preventing her from avoiding him as she'd seemed to go out of her way to do. She looked at his hand and for a moment, as he'd seen this cautiously and sought to stay beyond their awareness yet fearful of a clash of folk of Valinor amidst his halls. _

_**You have a sword that has great infamy on that back of yours. I know that the Utumnonatari is not dead, Melian and my own lord confirmed it. He said that he healed her, gave her a chance to atone.** _

_Aurelian had roughly wrenched her arm from his grasp._

_**The deeds of the Great King are not ours to question, and I would not dare. All I will say is that I am not the Utumnonatari, she is dead, in a truthful sense. The Great King may have made that effort but it is my belief that she crawled away from Melian and your lord to die.** _

_**It wasn't Melian and my lord who found her first, it was my brother-in-arms who went with her.** _

_**Again, I know nothing of her fate, for I did not find the sword on her corpse, if that's what you're trying to ask me.** _

_**It is, yes.** _

_**Then you are in danger if she lives. Utumnonatari was not forgiving of those who touched what she considered hers without her permission.....come with me to the West, where her star-song cannot pursue you.** _

_A look of sadness had seemed to cross her face then._

_**I cannot. Nor is it given to me to explain to you why I cannot. Believe me, High One, I regret more than most that I cannot go to a far green country and a bright sunrise but it is not my destiny.** _

_Then her hand had touched the hilt of the infamous Butcher of Dor-Lomin._

_**My destiny is intertwined with this sword and my role as its keeper. It is all that the Lords of the West have told me.** _

_Mairon had looked skeptically at her then._

_**None told me that there was one as you on this side of the ocean, and there certainly is no news of a being walking the world to heal its wounds.** _

_She had looked proudly at him then._

_**Herald of the Great King might you be, Mairon, but it is not yours to know all things, for none in the Blessed Realm do so. If they did send such an emissary, after the war, and the splendor loosed therein, why would they seek to advertise my presence past a point? It would encourage the worship of us as Gods, Sorcerer of Melkor, and whatever else I am, I am no God nor Goddess, nor aspire to be. I speak as an Emissary only that the people who live in the East should not think they are forgotten, not to boast of my power. Were I do to that, it would be a very different kind of boast.** _

_Mairon paused, for a moment, eyes gleaming with a light brighter than any of the lamps of Khazad make in this great Kingdom. That light shifted slightly as he narrowed his eyes._

_**Hmm.** Then that gaze went to the hilt. _

_**The Naugrim mentioned to me that you have roved across the Children of Arda, of the Choice and the Intent alike.** _

_**That is so, yes, Sorcerer of Melkor.** _

_**Hmm.** _

_And then silence had loomed in the halls of Khazad Dum bright and wondrous and illuminated with light. Not long thereafter Mairon had departed in a flash of light, and for a day thereafter Aurelian had lingered, speaking of new veins of Mithril deeper within the vaults beneath Khazad-Dum. She had encouraged digging at greater depths, promising wealth and an illumination beyond the wildest imaginings of those who did so. For now there was neither need nor wish, and with that note lingering, she had departed._

\----------

Memory faded, mostly, but what stuck with him was that when she had spoken those last words her eyes, eyes that had seemed to be as the eyes of the Children of Illuvatar, had changed. Suns, seemingly, and there had been such a strange droning that had thrummed in the air of Khazad-Dum. Low and baritone with a hint of brass instruments about it. His fine Dwarven head rang with the pressure and even a hint of power like this in memory produced a small throbbing. What would Elves, fair and free, in that new kingdom rising under that lovely woman with the Silvergold hair and her tall and warlike mate make of this?

It reminded him of that force that Dwarves heard seldom, though of all beings bar the declining and diminishing Avari the strongest and most warlike and the only ones able to sleep under open stars. They did so only in wars waged aboveground, with Men or Elves or the strange serpent-beings whose power in Harad was growing. Star-song, but how could that be? The Fallen was beyond the Doors and her monsters laid waste.

The throbbing in his head finally stilled after another couple of draughts of beer. Soon, the Elf-Lords would return from their Conclave in their capital. He would have to speak to them. One did not lightly dismiss words such as those from the herald of Melkor himself, and he had a great suspicion that both the King of Eregion and the Smith-Lord who was the greatest friend of the Khazad in the realm that was as yet in truth a single city and small villages that were growing would want to know that star-song in Maiar form had echoed there, the clamour ringing in his halls.

Seven days did he wait for the Lords to return and to re-establish themselves in their domain, and to see off the lords of the Firebeards and Broadbeams and wish them good luck in their return to the World's Edge Mountains. Theirs would be a long journey, even against nothing more than the will of Trees and wild beasts.

He shrugged. Not his problem, Khazad-Dum was, he knew, reaching its heights of glory. Thankfully that would not come to be his problem either, nor close to it. Glory carried great burdens and expectations and it would always recede. For now.....

He smiled at a much broader level and reached for his harp and began to play and to sing old songs of Mahal and of the paths and wanderings of his people, the deep-throated singing of Dwarves in their secret places. In that music his headache vanished totally, and for a time his troubles stilled.


	4. Aurelian and the Fell Men of Harad:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ilmarë Utumnontari, fresh from a visit to Khazad-Dum, heads to Harad and to the Kingdom of Commoria, where memory of the Star-Kindler is strong, and begins to gather her first armies and to sow the seeds of the future.

SA 101, KINGDOM OF COMMORIA:

To the Free Peoples of the North, the Haradrim and Easterlings would be given no names nor recognition of realms of their own, only various monolithic names. Yet in the records of later years, those of the time of the Hyborean Age, traces of those cultures endured in myth and history alike. Of the Haradrim realms of the Second Age, the greatest was Commoria, a dense and sprawling realm mightier than any in the West save that of Numenor itself. Proud and splendid was Commoria in those days, where cults of a great Frog-deity, Bokrug the Water-Lizard, were the unifying paths that linked it together, though the Avari worshiped those they called the Gods of the West, and the few Dwarves followed Mahal the Maker.

Others of the Haradrim were more suspicious of the peoples who were not human, but in the case of Commoria, the rising power to its south that was reaching its first apex that would only deepen and enhance, coming to full flower in the Fourth Age when the last phase of Commoria would wage its last wars with it and these wars would hurl armies north to defeat the grandson of Kemenarion and drag the United Kingdom with it, it had a ruler who was the first to use a term that the last of the Kings of Westernesse would contend with. Emperor. More precisely, King of Kings. Nine kings beneath the King of Kings, each ruler of a realm in his own right to rival legendary Doriath or Nargothrond of the Fair Folk.

In the Dawn-Time before the First Breaking of the World known to the Haradrim, the Star-Kindler's cult had spread, and foul deeds and rites had endured beneath the starlight. Then had the Avari withdrawn, save a few more savage ones that had become what their more wholesome kin called Star-Mad. Rites of blood and the offering of dripping hearts. Now the Avari had returned, more savage and more influenced by Star-Madness, and this was shaping Commoria in ways its lords could not fully predict, nor would they have been able to do so even had they wished.

In this context, where the worship of the Star-Kindler was spreading and the bloody rites on clear nights, hearts offered and flesh consumed by priests and blood drunk by celebrants, were in revival, came a being of shining splendor who thrummed with the pure and lovely rhythm of Star-Song. A great sword of the holy power of the Star-Kindler was strapped to her back. None had seen in person the power and majesty of the Utumnonatari, though the sword Nightfall and its repute had spread well before anything else. A sword to burn kingdoms, it was whispered in the dead of night in caves or dwellings where stories were told in firelight.

The being that strode into the capital of Commoria, Akeltrin, was akin to a very tall woman of the Firstborn, yet there were things that were not quite right. Her skin was profoundly pale, near the hue of bone. Her hair shone with many colors, and it truly did shine, light that droned with a hypnotic melody echoing from it. Her eyes likewise lit with star-flame that cast a thickening effect on the air before it. She wore a simple tunic and pair of trousers and yet the Power that exuded from her was strong, echoing with the Music of the Spheres.

Out of myths and legends had one of the Star-Gods come, and with her, in a pack that she had carried at her side, she brought an image, one that began to displace the worship of Bokrug the Water-Lizard, whose eidolons would come to be forgettable and forgotten. It was the image of a great being graven in what was akin in a sense to obsidian and yet not, marked with swirling lights. A woman, she was, voluptuous and curvy, with a mouth that shone in a wide grin and eyes that seemed infinitely deep. No metal nor gemstones of Earth or Earth's make could do this.

This eidolon she had presented before the Emperor, who had seen it with rapt awe and asked her:

"From whence did such an image come?"

_**From her who came from the stars and brought her images with her. Of her own hands and of her own make was this built that her name may never truly die.** _

"This is of the Star-Kindler herself?"

_**Of Elentari and all her works, aye. It is a gift, Emperor of the Four Corners. A gift and a sign of the Lady of the Starlight's favor.** _

He leaned forward.

"In that spirit I more than welcome it. How came you to know of the Goddess's writ?"

From her back she drew a sword of splendid make, adorned with strange runes, and the form that had been that of a supremely tall and pallid elf-woman with multi-colored hair shifted. Her skin became whispy in the sense of smoke and light illuminated it, starlight, and with that sound and that droning that cast vibrations through the palace, liquid flame danced up the blade, flames that burned with an awesome heat that even for a second left the Haradrim much darker and clothes burned to ashes. The flames dispelled but she retained the form of divine glory, and in the light of her eyes and the air-rending droning there was a power that brought the Haradrim to their knees, and they bowed and worshiped with great full-throated songs that which had come among them again.

The sword, fire dispelled, went back in its scabbard but that fullness endured, as her light blazed with unhallowed power and echoed in a more deadly sense. Her smile was a gash of light that gleamed the more dreadfully,

In her mind she thought that such a bauble of her mother's make for a kingdom was a cheap price indeed. Commoria was a mighty realm and this would hold with the Emperor that was now. The statue would do its work and spread her mother's worship by the Song enmeshed with its frame.

Yet Commoria was not all that remained down here. There was that other realm, its arch-foe.

Only rumors had come to her in the Dawn-Time of Valusia, whose capital was Irem, City of Pillars. Strange star-fall and creatures of no human shape, unknown beings to the Vision of Illuvatar.

Primitive things they had been in the Dawn-Age, tribal things that skulked in deserts, and in its last centuries built a first city. Now Irem was growing in power and in splendor, and it was one of the greatest forces in the South.

Part of it was curiosity, something she could gratify freely without the burden of active power, as yet. Seeds had been planted and would have time to flower. But first......she would seek of the deeper Harad, north of Rhun but south of Commoria.

Outward she strode from Commoria, and then in that same form and power she began to run, glorying in her Ainu-shape and in its speed, and in the sheer freedom with Muspeldor some centuries away from its dawn. South she ran, into the area where the highlands and farmlands of the Haradrim were, Commoria shown to her in its fullest expense. Great armies could be raised here. Troublesome had the skill at arms of Men been in the Dawn-Time, where mere groups of dozens or fifties had held off great legions of Eldar, in the short and the medium term. And yet.....convince these Men that her mother and she were Gods, and that valor would become hers, and they would march against the Quendi in numbers exceeding that of Ulfang's hordes in the past. 

South she ran, and then she arrived at an area that while differing not in terms of plants or ground from the cities of Men around it, did differ and that vastly in architecture. It was primitve, yet Cyclopean. That sight led her to pause, and then, in a calculated deed, to transform herself into a daughter of Men in outward shape, though her pallor remained at bone-hue. Her hair was multi-colored again, and her eyes retained their starlight-glow as suns that gleamed from her face.

 ** _So this is Valusia,_** she murmured.

With that, she began her steps into that fabled realm She was entranced even from the beginning with a primitive hovel of the kind that the earliest Quendi cities in Eregion represented. These were bricks and buildings that were vast, things no child of Illuvatar could have easily managed, and the angles were not those of Men nor Quendi nor Naugrim. Nor, for that matter, of the AInur. A primitive frontier hovel, and an equivalent of a shack and it was built of black stone, of such heft that even she, daughter of the Star-Kindler, felt something that she had not felt in a long time in all truth, when she had not been in direct proximity of her mother. 

Wariness, caution. And _fear._ So long had it been since she had felt so simple and wholesome an emotion for reasons all her own that made her tread more confident, as she strode further south into an outward province of the First Valusian Kingdom. What wonders there were in the Great Lands, and what chances there might be to find here weapons, means to build great armies that would arise as out of nothing, armies that were beyond the reckoning of her foes. Perhaps there would be a time when the creatures of her Mother's make recuperated their numbers, but she could not guarantee it. And were she to seek to declare her Kingdom anew or to build one, that which could be her neighbor or her ally would mean very important things indeed.

The mountain-realm she was considering for her own domain was vast, a realm of volcanoes that warmed her heart, and Commoria and a vast realm to the east, a Chanyunate, one that sprawled a grass-sea and several smaller realms to its west and south. Commoria worshiped the stars. Thule, the smaller kingdom to its northeast, might or might not but it meant little to her either way.

Here? Her eyes were wide with wonder as she strode further into the province at that brisk pace that was her own. A Kingdom of something unknown. Part of her remembered in that past, that their Creator, the thing that called itself Allfather, and even a God to the Gods, had said things would come into being that would be as surprises and unknown things to the Ainur.

She paused, reaching past more such hovels and pens of livestock that were not, after all, so very different to what she'd seen in Commoria, and came at last to a proper town, perhaps even a city. this certainly qualified.

She looked, then, at Yigdra, the capital of that northern province, named for the deity to whom all the Valusians and their cousins of the future in the realm that would be Pellucidar held as their great lord. Thus far would she go and no further, for as she stared in wonder, a voice spoke to her in a guttural grunting-hissing tongue that was of no human origin.

She turned, and there laid eyes for the first time on one of the Valusians, a being very large, just under twice the height of a Man and at least twice as broad. Tanned leather formed a kind of vest and it wore a kilt, after a fashion. Its scaled hands had six fingers, each of which ended in wicked claws, and it stood on three toes like a bird, with legs that curved likewise.

Then to her further surprised and disconcertion, the thing spoke in very crude and half-broken Westron:

_What you are? No Woman have skin color that. Fae not welcome here. Even ones of Far West. Your kind bring ruin._

_Get you gone. No realm of yours._

Then she turned to him and smiled, and her human guise vanished and so did her tunic, replaced in a moment's thought with the glamour dispelled as her star-woven armor, her skin restored to whispy darkness defined by gleaming light that thrummed, as she drew Nightfall from its scabbard.

Flame danced up the blade, and the creature growl-hissed in turn.

**_I will not be given orders by a scaled savage in a kilt. I am she who was Ilmarë Utumnonatari, of the World-Ravagers of the Dawntime. I have come to your realm to surmise what there is to find. And so I have found it indeed. Your buildings are of no make of Illuvatar's children, nor of Ainur, and whatever manner of being you be, seek to hinder me in my Mother's work and Nightfall shall be the scourge of the Star-Kindler to you and your breed of savage vermin that infest a world that was never meant to be yours._ **

**_I was Ilmarë Utumnonatari, now I am she who is Queen of the Muspellir, the World-Destroyers, and it matters not to me that nature of what seeks to assail me. In fire you shall burn as they._ **

The creature's snarl changed and suddenly on those legs that were shaped like the forgotten saurians of the dawn-time it moved with a bewildering speed and Ilmarë smiled to herself. How interesting. The things were cowards, then. A bit of a light show and......

She raised Nightfall, and shouted in Valarin and fire kindled around the blade in the form of a long tongue of flame that raised upward and then descended to erupt outward, and in a sudden roiling maelstrom the fire descended and Nightfall descended on Yigdra Province, which in the Noontide Firestorm was no more, and for many and many a century no Valusians would tread the Firebaked Waste. And then one day, the ships of Tar-Anarion the Phoenix King called at Irem itself, the capital of Valusia, and explanations came to them of the Demon of Fire that had come and laid waste the city in a display of wrath.

And from that point forward, as in the Dawn-Time, the entities of Valusia, children of Yig, who had fallen from the stars in spears of silver metal, when an experimental attempt to cross from their homeworld to another across the expanse of the infinite stars had ended in a chorus of horrifying harmonics that echoed in Valusian itself and in their landing on a world unknown, became staunch allies of the Free Peoples, and would wage wars bitter and terrible in the south, as the power of the Kingdom of Muspeldor and its allies rose slowly and inexorably, until by the eight hundredth and fiftieth year of the age, Muspeldor had arisen as out of the volcanic soil of the Fortress-Mountains, and the great tower of Minas Muspelli with it.

In the first century of the Second Age, fire had been kindled and burned a region half the size of Eregion to ashes, and from that fire and the thrum of star-song that came with it, a heated wind smelling of ashes wafted north, through the land of Commoria that heralded in it the blessing of Tintalie, who was great and wondrous, and sang in choruses of glory. To the Free Peoples who knew too well what such an odor portended there was in it a sense of menace.

To the Blessed Land itself there was a challenge, and the first hint of the nature of a fell wind of the Tintalie's flames that was beginning to light sparks that would kindle to become a great conflagration.

Yet no further sign came for many centuries, and after her vanishing and the news from Khazad-Dum of the strange confrontation between Aurelian the Witch and Mairon herald of the Great King, Aurelian would emerge from the South little older than she had been centuries prior, and resumed itinerant wandering and performing wonders and seeking to atone to heal the world's wounds. Even as her counsel spread, the Men of the West, who grew in numbers, dwindled from the urban and warlike communities of the Dawn-Time to cultures that had lost the arts of farming, of writing, and to whom encounters with creatures that would be known as Entwives alone, within the next five centuries, meant that these arts were not lost to them.

To Dwarves she never returned again under the name Aurelian, and to Men she appeared with less frequency bar her journeys to the South where Haradrim and Easterling came to herald Sinmara of Muspeldor as no less than a Goddess who walked upon the Earth with sword of fire. Encounters with her after that first often involved them coming upon her polishing armor of bright golden hue that flashed with a curious droning sound, and as the Washer at the Ford what had begun in the Tintalie's great chorus began to be overlaid with and woven into tales of horror that established the true nature of the worship of the Outer Light that thirsted and sang for blood in the dead of night.

These deeds were done in the south in quiet, as a harvest was sown for the future, and in its legacy would sire evil to endure for ages to come.

From the two hundredth year of the Second Age onward, Sinmara of Amon Amarth came south seldom, for her task would be drawn north, where at last, troublesome elements and the ever-increasing weight of the stars, and other, less noble, motives led Gil-Galad to give tentative approval to Celebrimbor and to Aurelian, who had managed at last to make direct audience with him and with the Second Conclave of the Elf Lords.

Centuries later, when the West burned beneath the weight of Nightfall, Rings would be given, Rings enhanced by a small taste of Starlight amplifying their might, and new things of malice would arise, gifts of the Quendi given to spite the children of Men and of Khazad, to sow dissension and terror, and then under that power and the fearsome light of Nightfall, the Men of Harad repented of the welcome given to the image brought from beyond the Stars and of her who had gleamed with its song, but by then it was too little and too late, and into the hellish fires of damnnation they were dragged.

To the Free People, the turmoil and changes in the South were bur rumors, and half-understood at that. So they remained until a century after this visit Star-Madness broke forth in Commoria and a great lord of the place that called himself Neherzingetorix drew to him an army to march to the north and to pillage and burn and raise pyramids of skulls to slake the desires of the Star-Kindler.


	5. Nightfall comes to The House of Findor:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While working to aid a new Elven settlement, the future Sinmara of Muspeldor hears a family discussing a prophecy of which rumor has spread in unguarded times where evil is deemed lost. In fire and fury does the House of Findor perish, and from the south rides a new foe, great hosts of the Haradrim.

S.A. 110:

This year would be distinguished for the full arrival of a new kind of threat that would become perennial through the long Ages to come. In its high summer would arise a great host of those Men called Haradrim, swarthy of skin and yet with gleaming light seeming to burn from their eyes. This was but a small raid, and a furtive trial, and a dim shadow of Neherzingetorix's great wave of men of terrible gleaming eyes that bayed and thirsted for skulls and ruin. Yet its presence would be the more troublesome and would become a thing of murmur and of concern to the Quendi, even as it sealed in blood the alliance with Khazad-Dum, then coming to its greatest height.

In time, too, it would become clear just what manner of fate had befallen the House of Findor, a small community of Quendi who had set out from Imladris to establish part of a new colony, on the outer edges. What manner of fate, and what secret disclosed in more trusting times.

It began in the new colony, not yet named, and one that was in between the great city of Khazad-Dum and the easternmost city of Eregion, Him-Imrad. In times to come it would be known as Bregedur, for the traces of the terror that had arisen there, a name given in derision for what had been taken as a thing forgotten. There the entity known as Aurelian had come and had offered both words and counsel, her strength awe-inspiring. Still was her nature unknown, though Artanis and Celeborn had begun to have the first shadows of suspicion. She was resting from her labors, in this case helping to consolidate what would become one of the three famed gates of the city (and such knowledge of what was built and of its weaknesses would grant her great profit in time to come when the Quendi would rue being so trusting of one that came to them with glowing eyes and with the ever-present droning element that had seemed fair and yet was not.

Findor himself, and his wife, and two of their children were in deep conversation, yet the hearing of Aurelian was keener than they guessed.

"I grasp that Maglor Feanorion has spoken these things. I do not trust that family, nor any of their works. It's an absurdity, an act of calculated spite to slur those who were heroes, not thieves with swords that skulked and targeted the innocent beholden to that abominable oath."

His wife seemed to shrug. Then she spoke the words that would endure in the memory of the Queen of Muspeldor and draw herself into the Doom of Westernesse that is Downfallen, and sow much horror across Ages.

" ** _By the hands of an heir of Melian of the tribe of the Fallen shall the World-Destroyer fall and herself be destroyed._ **

**_The promise fulfilled in part shall be fulfilled in full. By the will of a daughter of the line of Melian and a mortal Man shall it be. Her face shall be as Luthien Tinuviel reborn._ **

**_The Nightfall of her people shall she be, and in her words shall come vengeance for the Quendi against the Nightfall of the Star-Kindler_** " 

Those are not words that are lightly spoken, and yet......why would they say that phrase? Amar-Dagnir. World Destroyer.There was but one set of the forces of the Old Enemy that used that name and their name for themselves none among our people dare speak."

"Truth, my love, and yet.....the name of that sword, that which Aurelian has on her back with that name has me....concerned. What then? If the Amar-Dagnir lives, then there is great danger for us all, for malice of her kind does not fade but grows and strengthens with time."

His wife shuddered.

Their son spoke, then: "Ada, the only trace of the old World-Destroyers is that sword."

"I know, son. But.......if such a being lives she will not be content to leave her sword in the hand of another, for it had the power of old to burn Dor-Lomin to ruin."

The son laughed, lightly. "And yet evil is ended, father. The Star-Kindler is beyond the Doors, and the House of the Jewelmaker dispossessed and in Mandos or left to sing in sorrow."

None noticed that Aurelian had ceased to rest as she had done prior, nor that a strange droning sound was thickening air around them, the sound a deep rumbling bass sound akin to the mountains of fire as they prepare their destruction and their creation alike. Neither did it occur to them until later than it should that around them the forest was silent, the predators and prey alike fleeing a greater force, for light were the hearts of the Quendi and full of hope, then. In the eyes of Aurelian there shone a brilliant and terrible light, and it was the heat that shimmered out that finally caused the Quendi to fall silent, and at last to fully notice that Aurelian, whose presence had seemed fair, was striding toward them and in her countenance was nothing fair at all.

Fire trailed behind her, her skin become dark, very dark, the deep blackness of the molten blood of the Earth and veined with lines of red, her eyes gleaming like suns.

Findor had been fortunate that all that he had seen in the Elder Age had been the Kinslaying in the Mouths, for he was young in the reckoning of Quendi. His wife, older, had seen other horrors, and was one of many cleansed of terrible wounds by Este and Nienna in the War of Wrath. In that place she had seen fire akin to this, and her face was pale.

"My love, what have we done?"

Fire followed the being that had grown great and terrible, a being whose shadow was more that of a mountain than a being of more truly temporal nature, and from her scabbard she drew a great sword adorned with Elven runes, but the words there were in no Elven tongue but of Valarin. Nightfall, in the hand of she who had been deemed among the dead unwisely.

 _ **You have done me a great boon, O House of Findor. A child of the lineage of the Star-Kindler, in whose face Luthien the Nightingale lives anew?** _Her voice was melodic and lovely, after a fashion, yet there were rasps in it that spoke of deeper truths. **_Such a being interwoven with mine own fate? The mortal and his Elven harlot were not the ones that cast me down nor those who wounded me._ **

Her hand moved down the high color and they winced, a horrific scar as that of a mauling by an animal visible, and her mouth gleamed with a reddish heat.

**_Huan, the Hound of the Hunter, he it was who cast me down and yet to him none of his proper due is given. There is no Hound of the God-Land now!_ **

Nightfall's fires blazed and now it was not starlight that gleamed from the blade, or not entirely so. It was a flame of horrid nature, the product of a soul made monstrous and given power that thirsted to taste its innate nature.

_**There is only me. You have given me the key to endure until the world is burned to ashes, and none are left, save we of the Muspellir, World-Destroyers who have burned the world in ashes and fulfilled my mother's mandate.** _

Nightfall fell and the House of Findor were left in ashes, their mansion burned down around them, and a glade formed in fire. Where the fires of the Queen of Muspeldor to come blazed no trees grew, and in later times and later years it would be this very land where the char endured as if the fires had been just hours prior that a group of adventures would find in desperate paths to the Mines of Moria.

The thrumming element of the light around her erupted in a crescendo of the old star-song of she who was beyond the Doors, and again there was a disquieting element where the brassy and unpleasant star-song of the Children of Old Night echoed like drums and brass, a muffled thunder to the Elves of Lindon and Eregion, and a faint and disquieting note in the Blessed Land.

Two years later the first of the Star-Mad children of Harad came, beings of swarthy skin, light brown with streaks of white in their hair though beings of youth. Fires burned in their eyes and they were splattered in traces of blood, their own and those of their victims. Just shy of a thousand there were in truth, and yet the burning of their presence targeted those beings known as the Middle Men, the pastoral children of the Edain who did not go to Andor and found themselves fallen into a loss of knowledge and of other things, besides.

A great pyramid of skulls was raised of the inhabitants to the south of Khazad-Dum and Eregion, yet the fires they left and the malice of their presence could not be denied to those who had knowledge as Galadriel of Eregion and the Kings of the House of Durin possessed. A small force a thousand strong, the dim shadow of what Eregion and Lothlorien yet to be would come to possess, joined a larger force of five thousand Dwarves clad in mithril with rune-adorned axes, for the men of the South had come on swift horses of roan hue at the start and yet not to them at this time, in the age before the new God-Empress of the realm of Arda had declared herself openly and forced such things on them with great fear and cruelty.

On the field of Celebrant did these forces face the hordes of the Star-Maddened, and in the Battle of the Field of Celebrant did they perish before Elven steel and Dwarven Mithril, and in this pact of blood did Eregion and Khazad-Dum begin to build the alliance that thereafter came to the aid of both.

In the return, it was Galadriel herself who saw the Burned Forest, and strode to it and stared for a time with a sight that was hers, keener than most of the Noldor of old and moreso than any living still in Middle-Earth save perhaps Kemenrond, Loremaster of Imladris. Her face became troubled though she did not speak of what precisely it was that disturbed her, though the then-King of Khazad-Dum believed that it was an element of the bootprints that had strode forth with molten ground charred in a way that matched no known creature in Middle Earth.

It was the experience of the Burned Forest, of the burning to ashes of a family that left Kemenrond troubled and willing to call the Second Conclave, and above all else, the presence of Aurelian herself at this conclave and the sense of the changing of the world therein that would lead the Quendi to an act of folly they would rue and rue greatly in time to come. From the burning of a Quendi family and a clash with Star-maddened Men on the Field of Celebrant, one of many battles to mark this field in the ages to come, came the approval at last of Gil-Galad Ereinion of a concept that would endure and shape the world to come. At last, Gil-Galad, concluded, whatever forces could command such dreadful flames unhindered must be gainsaid lest the Quendi lose all they were seeking to build. 

In the one hundred and twelfth year of the Second Age, a new conclave was called, the reasons held quiet and of great secrecy, and there the fateful decision was made that would begin to drag the Quendi into a terrible abyss of their own making. From it would spring things of wonder.....and one of great terror.


	6. Of the Second Conclave of the Elf Lords and the Rings of Power:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the wake of the Burning of the House of Findor, the self-proclaimed Emissary of Valinor, Aurelian, meets with the lords of the Quendi and of the Naugrim of Khazad-Dum and Belegost in a second conclave. In words of honeyed venom the path to the making of the Rings of Power begins.

S.A. 113, PALACE OF GIL-GALAD, HITHLUM, KINGDOM OF LINDON:

Three years had passed since the Burning of the House of Findor, and the Battle of the Field of Celebrant. No further ingression of the Haradrim had followed that first, though the memory of the fire in their eye and the reeking pyramid of skulls built from the ancestors of the Dunlenders and the Bree-folk, and even of the Holbytla later known as Hobbits long endured. In the wake of that assault Men of those named the Middle Men chose to flee, and moved to regions that would begin their long paths to separation. The ancestors of those who would become the Holbylta, whose fossils would be found in later years on the island of Flores*, where the Shire, sundered from the West in the wake of the War of Ruin, would find itself moved 'round the world, were those who would diverge furthest and greatest, matched only by the Woses, whose appearance was so distinct that some believed them part of a second and archaic kindred of Men.

The Woses+, the Dru-Edain, held that their ancestors had once been taller with smaller ridges over their eyes,++ and they would become the strangest of the kindred of Men. For where the Holbytla retained elements of their ancestral appearance, their smaller size, smaller than the bearded Dwarves, and their customs would become heavily interwoven with the culture and the language of the broader West. Indeed, in the region they termed Shire, the laws and customs of Arnor would survive to such an intact degree that the Reunited Kingdom was able to use the law-codes of the Shire as a basis to re-establish laws on a broader scale. Of great strength did the Hobbits possess, for though in a sense stunted Men, or kindred to Men, theirs was a hardiness to match only the Dwarves.

Their distant relatives the Druedain would lose memory of them except in very ancient legends. The wars come in larger ages would occlude this first great Age of Migration, when cultures moved north and west, and the legacy of Men vanished beyond elements of the coastline to the southwest of the later realm of Gondor, where the arrival of Tar-Meneldur's voyagers would see contact with these new cultures. To them the armies and colonists of fabled Andor, the Westernesse of ancient legnds, and the establishment of Umbar would be as the Gods themselves come out of the uttermost west.

These migrations would unfold over centuries, it would not be until Aurelian came to make permanent residence with the forges of Celebrimbor and the art of Ring-Making reached its height, some seven hundred and seventy years hence, that the Middle Men were fully established. To the lords of the Elven lands these were matters distant, to Aurelian her ventures to Harad, to Rhun, and to the vast and sprawling lands of the East meant as much, and of the Middle Men on the whole she would remain largely ignorant and unconcerned with any lasting focus upon them. Only in the Third Age would this change following circumstances none could have foreseen.

As the Middle Men moved to the north, Eregion, Lindon, and Rivendell would reach great heights, Quenya enduring in Eregion and Lindon in its fullest forms, Noldor culture attaining heights it would never know again and under Galadriel and Celeborn, though Galadriel and Celeborn spoke Sindarin and the Sindar ways endured in their own capital, Eregion became a realm of splendor to match the ancient Gondolin and Nargothrond.

In these days of change at the lower levels, none knew that the lords of the Naugrim, after a lapse of three years, had gathered at last with lords of the Quendi, in a second conclave more secretive and with far less fanfare than was so with the first. Here, in secret, it was decided that Galadriel, though of the kin of the Teleri and the Sindar, could be accounted a queen of the Noldor, were the title to become hers. At the time she expressed little desire for such a title, viewing the establishment of royal titles as one that had brought great misery to her family. Ost-in-Edhil became a royal capital in practice, though not name, and though she did not take the title of Queen, Galadriel would call herself the Lady of Ost-Edhil, a title which held for centuries and to her people, Noldor and those Sindar who chose to dwell in the new Elven realm, she was Queen in fact and in deed whether or not the name was hers to take.

In later years, the House of Stewards in the realm of Gondor would appeal to the example of fallen Eregion to justify what became in practice, though not in name, a second royal dynasty and the only one to rule a land of Numenorean heritage that would not be of the Peredhil line, though they were a family of Half-Elven descent themselves, the lineage of Hurin having descent from Numenorean elite and from a family of Vanyar that settled in Westernesse of old and intermarried with several of the elites. Unlike the Peredhil, these and the descendants, by a distant lineage, of the Peredhils in Dol Amroth, were never affected by the great Choice for in those descended from Sindar and Vanyar, there was no strain of the Ainur, and in the lineage of Dol Amroth the descent was of such a distant degree that it offered mainly keener sight in the hours of night, their eyes said to gleam with faint light in the night where they wished to see, and immunity as of the Peredhils to the predation and singing chorus of star-dawn.

All of these matters were immaterial to the gathered Lords and Ladies of the Elder kindred, for to them, greater matters spoke. The Naugrim of Belegost, restored and given a new realm in the Ered Luin, and the lords of Khazad-Dum, spoke and confirmed, respectively, a tale that cast doubt. Great were the works of Aurelian, who had proclaimed herself an envoy of Valinor, and yet to the Dwarves there had been strife and discontent between herself and Mairon, who as first among the Maiar of Mahal was given reverence little shy of that given Mahal the Maker. The matter of her possessing the sword Nightfall, and of the nature of the Fall of the House of Findor, which had burned with an element all too akin on a smaller scale to that which had been the end of Dor-Lomin and the old fastness of Orodreth ere its fall.

No outward signs of malice did she give then, nor later, for it took many centuries for that which was within her heart to reveal itself in full and by then the impact of betrayal and of the Elven making of the Rings had become still more clear. Yet enough signs of malice endured that the Naugrim, Galadriel and Celeborn, and Gil-Galad himself had sent messengers to find her and to give her summons to appear in Hithlum, at Gil-Galad's palace. For the better part of two years they roved Middle Earth in a time when the Eldar had fled and were slowly growing and multiplying within the Misty Mountains and in other secret places such as the mountains ringing that which would become Muspeldor, and when the Haradrim raid that had fallen at Celebrant was seen as a moment of fear but not yet as as such things would become.

In the south they found her finishing a labor to create a great bridge across the Anduin, a task which she performed with skill with a group of Dwarven smiths of the House of the Ironfists, one that she named 'Bridge of the Iron Hands.' In later years this bridge would become a force of weakness for the wars to come, and in the time between the War of the Last Alliance and the War of Ruin her servants would cast it down. In the beginning, however true or false her repentance, this and other deeds were the visible fruits of her labor. She thanked them for the message from the High King and said that within three days and four nights of their return to Hithlum in the far north she would be there, and so it proved.

None could say how Aurelian arrived, though those among the Wise who knew of the ways of the people of Valinor called the Ainur understood, at one level.

She arrived in Hithlum on a night when none saw her arrival nor the manner thereof, for it was a rare night in the far north when the skies were clear and the stars rang down in the chorus and the whispers of the Fallen who was Beyond the Doors. At her arrival the chorus, so often a thing of whispers in Elven lands even in the Great Lands that are Middle-Earth to the sons of Men and Dwarves, became more active, as if they were welcoming one of their own. None dared go out into Hithlum, and none knew what acts, if any, she took. Flesh as the Ainur take, unless they are bound in the form of flesh as the Fallen was in the later days of the Elder Age, is not true flesh in the form of the Children of Illuvatar but a shell that only outwardly resembles it. No sense of exhaustion does such flesh know, and its strength can be awesome and beyond that of the Children.

In the wake of the Downfall of Hithlum and the fall of the Lords of Lindon, most would regret that the warnings of Kemenrond and Celeborn that nothing that came when the star-whispers became a chorus of the Dawn-Time could be healthy or hallowed, and still more bitterly would that decision made in the Conclave be repented of.

The morning came and dawn cast red rays like fire within the city, and the guards who had felt a great slumber come upon them when the star-chorus began to speak from murmurs to a ringing droning sound of deep rumbles and fell yet lovely and ethereal harmonics, awoke to the sight of a giant of pale skin, hair white as snow, lips a deep blue hue, eyes that had a gleam that carried with it a low and almost inaudible and yet wondrous music that echoed within ear and mind and the very secret fires of the soul, yet upon its passing none could recall that which was beauty and at time screams of nightmares echoed with it Twice the size of a fully grown Man of the Secondborn, her raiment was a silverblue dress, with the sword Nightfall strapped to her back, the strap flowing like a sash of leather down the middle of her body from shoulder to hip.

Her face was marked by what the foolish and the beguiled would have taken for a smile, and most who looked upon her then agreed though none could say why the expression troubled them thus. With an escort of armed guards she strode into the palace, toward the throneroom of King Gil-Galad, where the main lords and ladies of the Quendi, Kemenrond of Rivendell, Galadriel and Celeborn now King and Queen in power though not in name, Gil-Galad Ereinion and his wife the High Queen, Celebrimbor master of the Forges and a lord in his own right by virtue of his descent from his storied yet ill-starred family, and to the surprise of others at the conclave, Cirdan of the Havens, who had come from the northern reaches to a conclave he deemed of deep importance not least for its providing a clear view of the strange roving miracle-worker with the monstrous sword at her back.

With them were the Lords of the Firebeards and the Broadbeams, and both the King of Khazad-Dum and several of his kin, the great thanes of the greatest of all the realms of the Dwarves. The Elves, in contrast to the greater conclave that had been marked by ill-concealed signs of strife and dissenssion among their lords, were clad in roben tunic and breaches, Celebrimbor wearing the symbol of his family woven into his tunic, Galadriel wearing the symbols of the House of Finarfin intertwined with the noble lineage of Doriath of Celeborn's origin, and Celeborn wearing the same symbols on his own tunic. On the High King and Queen were symbols not of Lindon but of Ilmarin and the twin trees of Kementari, most beloved of the Valar to the Elves.

By contrast, the Naugrim were clad in more ornate suits of armor than would have been worn on the battlefield and held no weapons, but it was the dour and brooding presence of Naugrim of war, a contrast befitting those who viewed Aurelian as threat and insult to Mahal and those who were wary but cautious about offending so powerful a being of Valinor, especially one who possessed the Bane of Dor-Lomin.

When Aurelian came to the door of the throneroom, one of the Quendi guards sought to remove the sword Nightfall from her back, and the low and muted kind of harmonics that followed her presence with an eerie sound between droning and the playing of a strange flute became that of a powerful and menacing drone of a kind more than slightly akin to that of starlight as the low gleam in her eyes blazed to a much brighter hue. The guard's wrist would remain bruised for two days even with the full weight of the healing lore of Kemenrond of Imladris at his disposal.

The drone echoing in the halls of the Palace led to consternation among the Quendi and to muscle memory-influenced reaching for axes by the Dwarf-lords before it passed. Then the doors opened and a tall blonde with glowing red eyes that burned like coal-fires and a sword of vast proportions with gemwork worked in to gleam with a pattern akin to the Tintalacircya whose apex is the North Star, whose singing droning chorus would lay low the Land of Lomar, last of the ancient realms of human and Elven dream-time during the Fourth Age.

Before them stood Aurelian, whose gaze was confident and her posture even displaying a kind of arrogance that brought on disquiet, her eyes briefly widening and then narrowing at the sight of the King of Khazad-Dum, and moreso at the newly crowned King of Belegost.

The encounter began with her kneeling before the High King of the Elves, feeling for the first time a great killing urge swelling up within her the way that it had within her mother of old. Like the great waves of the realm of Ulmo it moved, a force that had her focusing consciously on closing her eyes and speaking in carefully moderated phrasing, her wording simple and clear.

_**Hail Ereinion Gil-Galad, HIgh King of the Noldor and all the Quendi of the Great Lands! Hail Andvari, King of Belegost Renewed, Land blessed beneath the Blue Mountains. Hail Noldin, King of Khazad-Dum, greatest of the lands of the Naugrim, ever great the valor of their axes and the sweet song of their harps!** _

The greeting, as was its intent, with her kneeling likewise diffused some of the hostility and a strange element was woven into her appearance, one that brought disconcertion to Kemenrond, who was able to in a sense shield himself from the power of the droning music that echoed with a higher and sweeter element like that of harps save for jagged elements that punctuated speech. Her speech was that he remembered well from seeing the person of Eönwë, master of swordsmanship in Arda, who was of the Vardarin kindred. There had been a music about his nature that echoed as a pure version of the Music of the Spheres, and it had been enchanting. In the presence and the nature of the lights that gleamed from the eyes of Aurelian, there was more of a kin to the power that sang from the stars of desires of carnage and the laying low of that which was beyond all else wishing that life, in all its contradictions, be no more. 

The Sindar-knowledge that had been taught to Galadriel, and the power of Melian likewise, shielded herself and her husband twice-over, yet the Naugrim and Gil-Galad and his Queen and Celebrimbor of the Feanorians were not near shielded thus. For the Naugrim this meant little, for theirs were a hardy folk, and it was one of them who waited until Gil-Galad gave his own flowery response who asked the first question:

"You came to my father's halls, Aurelian of the Blessed Land, some decades ago. In that time Mairon, of the people of Mahal the Maker, encountered you and referred to you by a name thought lost in the Dawn-Time. We were told that she was slain by the hands of Beren and Luthien of that time, in the quest for the Silmaril."

The Elves, even under the power of her wielding the new gifts her mother had bestowed upon her so very unwillingly, could not resist heeding to elements of a voice that was low, lower than the norm of a voice of the women of the Children, yet echoed with a power akin in a very loose sense to that of Melian of Doriath, the Faerie Queen gone over the Hill and Across the Water.

_**King Noldin of Khazad-Dum, the Lord Mairon is a servant of the Great King, for half a Valarin year, and servant of your maker. Mighty is Melkor of Valinor, Great King of all Arda, the sword and the hammer that is bane of the Outer Light and architect of the great deeds of Middle Earth, with a share in the gifts of all his brethren. Yet he no more than his kindred of the Lords of the West knows all that is to be known, nor is it that all his kindred would speak to him of the missions of others where they are sent. In his name I have not come, but in the name of the Lord of the Seven Winds, the Oracle of the Allfather.** _

Her smile seemed warm and welcoming to most, though the eyes of Celeborn and Galadriel and of Kemenrond were hard and distrusting, and to them it was not a smile but a wicked leer, her grin not that of a mouth that belonged in a face like those of the children but wicked fangs that shone with an inner light.

_**He did not recognize me, for the master that propels me is one to whom he and his master are ever blind, and it is the secret will of the Allfather himself that I am here to execute, that the world's wounds be healed.** _

The answer seemed to work enough, and even Galadriel and Celeborn and Kemenrond had to grant that it was grudgingly plausible, and perhaps had enough truth to it.

"Then why did he call you by the name that none dare speak?"

**_He saw the sword at my back, O King, and he surmised that none could wield the sword Nightfall save by the will of she who was once its master, and believed and unfortunately, erroneously so that I was she. I am not she who was overthrown by the teeth of Huan, Hound of Valinor, nor by the lovers who gained the Star-Jewel from the crown of the Queen of Old Night. It took it from her corpse, where the teeth of Huan had led her to die, and to burn into ashes, her soul now resting, I presume, beyond the Doors of Night. Yet the blade's power did not expire with her, and I do not trust it in the hands of any save the people of Valinor, and none save I._ **

**_A voice spoke to me when I seized it, a voice that echoed sevenfold as of seven winds, and in that seizure and in that trust, I have gained what I must do, and that which must be done. Of old I was of the Vardarin people, that Ainu-tribe that forged the stars, but I repented and went before the Ring of Doom and the Fourteen Lords of the West and was told with the sword as a reminder of the price of becoming one of the Fallen's brood that I must go in the Earth and seek to heal its wounds. It is in this sense that the power of the Music and the Dawn-Chorus that forged Ea from the emptiness that still was echoes. Even in repentance the foulness of the Fallen endures thus, and it is a reminder of what I have overcome, and what it is that I strive to do._ **

**_She of whom you speak is no more, she bled out in a forest, and I was last to see her, and to see her malice dissipate when the will to sustain her flesh left her body and her shrieking soul fled to Mandos, and then beyond the Doors. And now I, Aurelian, am the Bearer of the Word of Valinor, and a strong arm to ensure its deeds are done._ **

Against their will and their greater judgment, in lesser and greater degree, respectively, Kemenrond and the rulers of Eregion found their qualms stilled, to a degree. To openly confess those ties was true enough, and even Melian had had elements of music and its power interwoven into her family, as the song of Luthien of the Fae people had shown most directly. Their hostility stilled though the Dwarves simply held their tongue, seeing with some suspicion how even those Elves little less hostile than they were beguiled by the strange glamours and works of the Maia that stood before them.

Gil-Galad asked, all the same, with a surpassing strength that at least in part surprised Aurelian herself:

"Tell me then, Bearer of the Word, if she who wielded the sword is dead, whither the fate of the House of Findor? An entire family of Noldor burned to ashes and the nature of the burning was akin to that wielded by no less than the Nightfall itself."

Stoic was her face, and nothing in her eyes nor the tone of her voice betrayed any emotion when she responded:

_**It is known that there are Wyrms in the Cold Heaths where there are new Star-Dragons growing to maturity, and that a few of the Valaraukar of the old days have fled and hidden themselves within the deepest recesses of the world. No great stretch is it to me that some wicked scion of the old lineage of the Vardarin who has not repented managed to flee likewise, and to wield great fires within her. Should I find that force that laid low the House of Findor, I shall ensure that the name that has done so shall pass from the Earth that few shall dare to speak it aloud, save with the greatest regret.** _

_**The power of the Star-chorus within her was working more greatly now that she had named her lineage openly, and in the hypnotic cadence combined with the flow of her words like a great tsunami coming to shore with inexorable force, hostility defused and eyes that gazed like thunderclouds stared more blankly.** _

_**Between that fall and the coming of that set of barbarians that raised the pyramid of skulls, I grant to you a prospect that would make that healing of the world's wounds and the courses and the tides of change the greater, that the beauty of Arda endure and the Noldor return to the glory of the Dawn-Age and in their presence that glory endure unchanged beyond the Breaking of the World**_.

To her amusement even Galadriel leaned forward with rapt attention, though least of all her kindred, and so she wove a great vision in a speech of surpassing loveliness, whose words were amplified by the power of that harmonic drone. Elven might brought back to that of the Dawn times, Dwarven lords able to grant themselves gold that with nine turns of a ring in nine days would ensure gold that could never replenish itself (and to this the greed of the Naugrim was awakened and their eagerness, were it possible, to contain and to focus such power). To restore the world to a beauty to match that of the old Valinor in the time before the fall of the Trees, a beauty awoken and kindled in the Great Lands by the hands of Elves, a vision to show that the beauty of the Allfather's creation knew most those who worked the greatest to its aid and to its power.

Feanor Finwenion had spoken in wrath and malice where he spoke to incite such sentiments within the breasts of the Noldor. Hers were words of delicate beauty and a rhapsodic vision that became real, a land frozen in eternal beauty that would never die nor truly dim, the world's wounds restored that even the Valar would acknowledge the power and the beauty of the works of the Exiles.

Hours passed as she wove her tapestry of speech, and when the tapestry was complete she stepped back, eyes gleaming with a brilliant hue and the air thickened with the weight of her presence echoing with the music of the Dawn-Age, and it was Celebrimbror who leaned forward and asked the question all wished an answer to.

"How are such miracles to be possible?" 

**_Your ancestor, mightiest and greatest of all Noldor men, as mightiest of all Elven women is seated here in this council, worked wonders in the form of jewels. It is my belief that bands of what seems but is not truly so in the form of gold, where the power and the harmonics of creation are interwoven to work elements that may become the greater, may do this. Bands on fingers or arms, but in the symbolism of a circle there is a strength that none shall dim, and a light that shall never fade._ **

And with that she fell silent for a time as the Quendi and the Naugrim debated, and then, though Galadriel and Celeborn and Kemenrond did not give verbal sanction, neither did they give verbal condemnation. To Celebrimbor, great Forge-Master of Eregion would be given the task to unlock Ring-lore, and for lapses of time and space there would be long intervals where the deeds of Aurelian would unlock great wonders in other forges with other tasks, yet ever would she come and spend from weeks to months, or even years, with Celebrimbor as his arts developed and that which had become concept became tangible reality.

Six centuries would lapse from the time the least of the lesser Rings was made until the Great Rings were made, centuries in which Eregion grew to its full flower.

Yet never did the distrust of the Naugrim and of the rulers of Eregion lessen where the presence of Aurelian, who had called herself Bearer of the Word of Valinor, was concerned. She made no effort to challenge such views, nor to contest them, and as Eregion and Lindon rose to great and splendid power, her wonders added to their glories.

A century later, Neherzingetorix of the Men of Harad arose upon the settlements of the southermost Middle Men in the region of the Anduin as a ghost of great malice, for fearsome was the light in his eyes, and loud was the chorus that echoed in his mouth and that of his armies of marchers and riders clad in great armor that coated the body as a second skin:

_A! Elbereth Gilthoniel!_   
_silivren penna míriel_   
_o menel aglar elenath,_   
_Gilthoniel, A! Elbereth!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *In this case, the Holbtlya are considered for all practical purposes Homo floresiensis, integrating elements of IRL paleoanthropology. 
> 
> +Woses are Neanderthals. 
> 
> ++Their ancestors are blends of Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis.


	7. Of the Spawn of Ungoliant, the Lady of Ost-in-Edhil, and the Sword Nightfall:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Galadriel, on a journey to meet her husband at the forges of Celebrimbor stops in a wood to avoid the starlight on a clear night. A spawn of Ungoliant, mother of Shelob, sees her light and decides to make a meal. The fires of the Muspellir burn in woods in the dark of night.

S.A. 160:

Forty years before the invasion of the Star-Men of Neherzingetorix, the Lord Celeborn of Ost-in-Edhil made a call upon the Lord Celebrimbor. Not yet had the fires and frost of estrangement done their work and laid the ground for the Second Sundering that would see many of the best and the fairest of Eregion go East to the woods of Lorien, there to build a great elven kingdom and the last heart of Elvendom in Arda. Yet in the night, not all shadows that would veil against stars were wholesome. The monsters of Ungoliant of old had fled, and many were hunted down and destroyed by the hands and sword of Mairon and the herald of the Seven Winds, many, yet not all. 

There were no clouds as the Sun began to set, so the Lady Galadriel dared not risk a night in the open starlight. Well might her husband dare, for mighty among the Sindar was he, who had waged war on the foul hosts of the Eldar of old beneath starlight when it and it alone had cast fell lights in Middle-Earth. Yet not, when on her own, did she tempt fate. She had beheld the fell eyes of the creature that called itself Aurelian and had neither love nor trust for such a being. She had seen such eyes once before when the fall of Doriath had come and she had sought, at the last, to aid her old mentor before Celeborn had dragged her away with him lest she tempt a force beyond her. As a colossus lit in starlight had the thing moved, and yet Melian lived and had spoken to her in deep worries.

Alone among the Quendi leaders, Galadriel and Celeborn knew a truth, a bitter and a painful truth. The Utumnonatari, the fiendish force with the sword of flame that had laid low the Men and Elves of Dor-Lomin lived. Lived, mutated, changed. Melian had come to see her but once more before departing from the West and she had warned that great power had been placed into one who was already as the lesser Valar, and was now as the greater, a force that as the power of the Gift of Eru, Death and Mortality, worked its will would grow as its foes dwindled. The sword Nightfall had been a fiendish thing during the burning of Dor-Lomin. Some revenant, some demon of the Fallen, had wielded it then, and alone among the Quendi she knew that it was no revenant but the very being deemed slain by Huan's teeth and Luthien's enchantment.

She, too, alone among the Quendi grasped the full danger of that boast and the snares it had placed for her granddaughter, and because of the marriage of her own daughter, to her family.

Those thoughts had haunted her in this forest, where shadows grew and they were not the soothing and protective shadows that muffled the ringing chorus of the stars, foul and ethereal, that craved and bayed for blood and skulls, the great tribute of the kind the monster-Men of the Harad had raised before her forces and those of the King of the Dwarrowdelf had brought it down. A vile skittering she heard, soft and iron-hard, a thing bloated and aching with Hunger that pulsed and echoed with a malice ancient beyond the ancient things.

It breathed in a tongue of malice, speaking the witch-speak of that entity that had called her self Queen of the World Ravagers. 

She drew her blade, which shone with no light to warn of Eldar presence, but that meant nothing. At the worst extremity, she would take the blade and impale herself, for better that fate than to be taken alive by-

 **No, little Elf, you shan't deny my prey. Mother made me a monster, bred with my father against his will. Her own son he was and behold that which she hath wrought**.

It was a bloated thing vaguely akin to a spider, yet there were elements of a ram and a goat and other things about it. Reality seemed to distort in a way that was more unhallowed than any thing of star-flame.

**Ah, little Elf, great things were delved and forged in ancient years, blood of stars and other things that harnessed such...power. Of the very blood of she called in your tongue Tintallie, Star-Kindler, and other names besides mother drank, and it poisoned her, made her run mad and devour herself to get the poison out. Fall did she, fall in such delicious agony.**

Down the shadow-thing moved and it landed in front of her, and it stood on six legs while raising two. It had many faces and no faces, and reality hissed in the wake of its presence warping what it looked upon and it beheld.

**It has been too long since I tasted Elf-blood. So many there were who sought to brave your mentor's Girdle in the old days, yet could not, and were driven mad of it and fed to us. Such a great feeder she was. And now.....**

Galadriel raised her sword, now Artanis as she had been. Motherhood had softened elements of her frame but nightmares and elements of seeking to banish them had hardened it and others.

**How delightful, a minor scion of the thought of Illuvatar seeks to contend with a spawn of a spawn of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with Ten-Thousand Young! I say to you, before your Allfather was, she is! She, who is among the greatest of all things, God beyond the Gods. To her existence is but a toy to contend with, and your worlds but.......realms through which her spawn and her heritage may know great things.**

**I am of that heritage, daughter of a God of Gods. You are my prey. Surrender, Elf-maiden who would be Queen, and let little Yehur-Nagaszzhir feed upon thy flesh and thy soul!**

Her sword lanced out but it shattered in a flash against the thing's fangs, and it laughed, as its foot struck her with a blow that hurled her against a tree. Her head rang with the blow and her blood spattered out.

The spider noticed the thing that had manifested of her own thought well before Galadriel did, her vision swimming and blurring, seeing multiple monsters, and it hissed in malice but decided to strike out with its pincer, to weaken the pre-

The being stood, heat beginning to burn bright and terrible and an echoing resonance came. Not that of starlight as it had been in the palace of Gil-Galad. This was the fruit of ancient tortures in the Elder Age, where the Fallen had sought to defy her Father's writ.

The being's malice smote Galadriel as fearsomely as did its heat, and she shuddered. Her mistress had not lied, then. She felt a deep sense of regret. If one did not kill her, the other would.

A moment flashed with her vision recalling the thing that had strode toward her mistress, whispy darkness echoing from starlight and the tones of the Star-Kindler echoing with poisoned song from its voice.

The webs of Unlight began to wither and fell as a dust, the spider hissing in anger, and from the being that moved and glowed with reddish light's back was drawn a great blade that Galadriel knew, felt the malice as painfully as the creature's own stare.

Fire danced up the blade like a river, but this too was not the starlight that had been. As what it had been it thirsted for annihilation. Now it gloried in violence in a way more prone to revelry than before.

**I am a God of Gods, you are but the bastard get of the Fallen. My mother imprisoned yours and drank of her blood.**

**_Too bad she did not kill her, then._ **

The tone was mocking and it echoed with a power that she had felt but not heard, not in truth, not before then in her life. Musical it was, yet a music ugly and monstrous.

_**Balrogs came to her aid, beings of fire and terror that she could not counter. I was once of the Vardarin, she who ensured my mother's stars sang in their chorus, each in the positions she dreamed. Of starlight and its permutations none among my kind, most of whom dwell in the far reaches of the Void, know more than I, but that was not enough for her. She wanted a scion of Valar-scale, of Vala-blood, yet the Lord of the Seven Winds denied her this.** _

The dust that fell did not dim her glow, which intensified and she seemed to swell, becoming as a hill and the edges of her person did brush against the canopy of the forest that lit and writhed in her fires.

**_I am more than any Balrog, even my old colleague Gothmog, hewn by Elven blade in Gondolin of old. And you, granddaughter of the thing that brushed Arda in the old days, are not one of the dread Young, you are lesser, debased._ **

**So are you.**

**_In one sense, perhaps. But now, I have risen. Before I called myself Queen of the Mund-spilli, the World-Destroyers, as a term to instill fear in the heart of Men and of Elves, and as a recognition of my mother's great goal. It was a term of a warrior's make, befitting sister and consort of the herald of the Lord of the Seven Winds who might otherwise have been. Now, scion of the Young, I am not the one who died of a wound to the throat in the old days, left to die by Eldar in an act that truly would have been mercy._ **

Nine steps she had taken and now the spider drew back from Galadriel, for the first time feeling fear.

_**Now, I am Sinmara, the Pale Nightmare, the pallor that comes against you in the dead of night with a sword of flame, she who has a power to lay low worlds. Great were the wounds dealt to me in days of yore and I remain between a choice. To rebuild my mother's work, or to provide what she could have become, and then thereby to go to the West and to become the Fifteenth on the Council of Doom.** _

For now, that choice lies far from me, and in that voice was a gloating weight and Galadriel slumped, breathing with difficulty from fractured ribs, yet she could see a giant with a flaming sword raise the sword two-handed and roaring in Valarin and then the sword swooped downward and then a sudden flash of light reality shattered and she caught a vision of things that existed beyond it.

_But the dimmest glimpse of a great and bloated thing on a gilded throne, armor that added to the bloat and giving off an aura of menace and hunger, amidst a vast and golden citadel that towered like a temple beneath skies of blood._

_A vast and slopping citadel imprisoned beneath Lord Ulmo's power where voices gibbered in a guttural tongue that was more ancient than Arda itself, and yet somehow was within it._

_And halls, halls where the Ainur in unclad form waited and she saw Him, the Creator of All that Is, and His eye turned to her, and in kindliness and compassion He gazed._

So she fell into slumber in the Shattered Woods, where a scion of Ungoliant perished as Nightfall fell upon her, and before her turned the creature Sinmara who would arise to plague her family in time to come.

As a giant she stood, her sword's fire ensuring no blood coated it, nor herself, and her sword was raised now with a single hand. A single stroke and Artanis-Nerwen would be no more, and it could be blamed on the spawn of Ungoliant whose eruption fitted a pattern well known from the war, from the time that two of the beasts had come to the Mouths of Sirion when the Ered Gorgoroth had burst open and been slain by Curunir and Olorin in full majesty as Maiar, fighting even then as close allies (though Olorin remained unaware that even then jealousy was germinating within the person of Curunir).

The fires dimmed and Nightfall went within its scabbard, and the being resumed her normal, pallid appearance, her hair dark as the night her mother wielded. Galadriel's horse was slain, the beast fortunate that her flames had roasted it before the shockwave annihilated it, and she knelt before and began a low song of incantation. The burns healed and were restored, an ancient art of Vardarin knowledge so that torture might be prolonged, initially, and the misery of a subject given greater extension. Yet here it worked in truth for the purpose that its other element offered in falsehood.

From her pack she took a dress that she had made, and wrapped it around the person of the lady Artanis, and took her with her into the deeper elements of the forest where she kept watch through the night but nothing seemed to stir.

The next morning she called to herself a steed, a creature that was like and yet unlike a horse, and still Galadriel remained in a deep swoon overwhelmed by the sights that had gripped her. She knew what manner of things she'd seen, the monsters that lurked Beyond the Veil, Outer Gods that were unkindly and yet indifferent.

With that swiftness they arrived not far from where Celebrimbor made his house, in the realms that would become the forests of Old Man Willow. In the distance a yellow hat bobbed and a melodic song echoed.

_Hey dol a derry dol a ring dong dillo!_

For a moment the entity smiled, and the misery that had been and which would await receded, and she made a point to ride north for another couple of days. Iarwain Ben Adar was ancient and his own master, and for a moment within moments she felt a deep and abiding envy. Yet she did not turn back, bringing Galadriel to the house of Celebrimbor, where the forge-master, who had spoken with Lord Celeborn of worries, saw the towering form of Aurelian holding an unconscious and weary Galadriel in her arms.

In quiet she spoke of an encounter with one of Ungoliant's spawn, of the dire straits that had made her draw Nightfall from its scabbard, of the accursed blade slaying a thing of greater evil. Yet such was the relief of her husband that Galadriel lived that he cared not for her words, nor to listen for truth in them.

In dreamless sleep Galadriel abided for a count of nine days, until she awoke to find Aurelian seated by her bed, her husband and Celebrimbor even then slumberign in the small hours of the morning.

She backed up with fear. The creature that looked at her with a pallid face grinned with a sickly smile that curved from ear to ear and a bright light burned like suns in her eyes. The monster that had been bane of Elves, the thing that killed her bro-

"I know who you are." The words were not as calm as she wished, they were squeaked in a high tone of terror.

_**I know, and even if you had not suspected, I showed you. Yet here you are, alive. Spared of greater ingominy. No fate for you, Artanis of Doriath, in the belly of one of Ungoliant's foul brood hatched by foul means. Even at my worst I would not have had you fall to the hand of another. Here, the fell side of me and that more benevolent one agree. And I will do us all the virtue of not lying here. It fell good to kill that abomination, to take my blade, Dor-Lomin's bane, and to turn it to better purposes.** _

"Are you mad? You confess that you are her, you are lmar-"

 _ **Do not say that name**_ , and the kindness was replaced by malice and a sudden slap of heat that awoke her husband and Celebrimbor.

_**She died, in that forest, long ago. I am given a chance to repent. Those were the words of the Great King himself. To repent, to atone for my deeds here in Middle-Earth. No trial for me in the Ring of Doom, my malice was here, so must my atonement be. Not to seek pardon but to show it, that the will of the Valar endure and that Middle-Earth not be forgotten. Never to tread unless my deeds show sufficient atonement on the Undying Lands and to be among my kindred ever again, that taken from me by my mother's deeds, by her blade and by her torments.** _

The light in her eyes was not pleasant.

**_Yet, all the same, I spared you that fate. Your brother died at the hands of the beast slain by Luthien and Huan. I regret that, as I do other fell deeds. Weariness came upon me at the end of that war and in the sight of its aftermath. I cannot atone to you, I do not intend to try. And yet.....as I said, even that which was the force overthrown by Luthien Tinuviel and Huan would have done so, for she would have seen you and your brood of the lineage of the Half-Breed overthrown likewise._ **

**_You showed great heroism in seeking to face a force you did not understand. She showed me something of the truth you saw, in that flash of it demise. There are things out there, beyond the Void, that lurk and thirst and gibber for things beyond which any given world, even all Ea are as nothing to them. You did not face such a one yourself, but its spawn, its granddaughter, after a fashion, and you did not yield, nor break._ **

The monster leaned close to her and her breath was the heat of a volcano. 

_**Consider your power displayed there, and that in itself a reason to spare you if none else. For you withstood greater horrors than I, with nought but wounds that were healed to show for it. Your mind intact, and courage beyond that of your brother and the rest of your kindred in the Wars of the Elder Age. Not against you is it that the creature's power is beyond Elven blade. A daughter of the creature, not so, but a direct spawn of Ungoliant, well.....you fought, O Artanis-Nerwen of Valinor and Doriath, even if you knew fear and who would not? The creatures that lurk without are great and they are terrible, yet this was weak enough that it fell not to your blade but to mine.** _

Her tone was pleasant, though the words were not.

_**Your life owed to the sword you so feared sixty years prior as mortals reckon it, and your realm enriched by an entity that now you have confirmation thereof. Yet if you note this, then you note that you were spared by the monster, and then what?** _

From pleasantness her tone changed to gloating.

_**Gil-Galad and his family see you as a thrall to the lusts of the Feanorians, it is why they den you with the last of the monsters, so that if his blood of traitors and kinslayers should out, well, the family target for that lust is there to divert him to more pleasurable endeavors then seeking to work starlight into a gem. That is their intent, for they too are Noldor, the kin you fought against in the Kinslaying to save your uncle. Seldom do you speak their speech, for you speak the tongue of the Grey-Elves.** _

_**Celebrimbor thirsts for a throne, his father and his uncles and his grandfather and his great-grandfather all held them. And no love has that lineage ever had for the House of Finarfin, whose father abandoned his kin and fled to the safety of Valinor, and for this was not accounted accursed beyond the Ban.** _

_**And so now, you come to this, Artanis. You know, and perhaps from your lips, he shall know, that the being who died in that forest did die, but her flesh lives, changed. Empowered. Made dreadfully strong, a fire to scourge and burn worlds. Or to cleanse them. A being that spared your life, and sought, perhaps, to atone for the crime done your brother the Cave-King. Or perhaps merely to sow dissension and falsehood in an act of feigned kindness, and to cloak malice in open words, that deeper designs go than any your stunted kindred of vermin could imagine.** _

_**So consider your choices. Speak against Aurelian the healer and be given once more to the tender lusts of the Kinslayers who haunt your nightmares, or accept that your life is owed the monster that could be a great healer and even now struggles against a poison within my veins, and that ever shall that memory sour for you that set of choices you have made. Such are the rewards of monarchy and its burdens.** _

With that she smiled and in a blink of Galadriel's eyes seemed gone, though a fell heat lingered and in its wake Celeborn and the forge-masters of Celebrimbor and he himself fell into a drowsy slumber.

For a time Galadriel stared into space blankly, then shut her eyes, then opened them with a hard stare.

She had been given a freedom of decisions to make, and there were but only a few right options. And the first of these was to sift truth from lie, and to decipher what, if anything, lay behind the claims of Celebrimbor, who had after all eschewed the deeds of his family, and of his father no less. Too easy was it a lie for an enemy who had eschewed intrigue to claim, and yet if she was to face her nightmares, face it she would.

She took the dress the monster had sought to clothe her in and shredded it in a spasm of violence that matched the memories of the Kinslaying and its gunfire, breathing heavily for a moment, then her eyes closed and the moment passed. From a wardrobe she found a simple, rougher dress, one far beneath her usual standard, but better this dress meant for a peasant-Elleth than anything bequeathed by the horrid giant with that sword.

Part of her pondered, too, how much good it would do. The giant said that its fate was not certain, that Lord Melkor the Great King of all Arda had issued a Doom. His the prerogative of Kingship, and if he had sought to issue a Doom, then he could have done it. Was it truthful? How could this being have spoken of the Fallen as Mother? Ainur were not like the children of Illuvatar, it was impossible for them to have offspring, save by the will of Illuvatar. She knew what she had seen, and what she had heard, beneath the forest. A giant of the fires of Aule's forges, darkness darker than night yet illuminated by reddish veins of heat. She had seen Nightfall unleashed and believed fully that such a sword that smote a scion of Ungoliant could be the Bane of all Dor-Lomin.

The term Jotunn had been applied by the forces of the Enemy to those beings once of the Onodrim and their spouses twisted and warped by the power of the Star-Blooding. Yet the term as easily applied to what had stalked the night before her and spoken words of malice.

Of herself her hand went to the streak of white in her otherwise lovely hair, a nervous gesture in times of indecision. Curufin's gift, along with the memory of his body against her own, of his blade carving a word into her flesh.

A great secret was entrusted to her, but she knew already that the decision to begin the work that would become Rings of Power was in motion. What had been called would not be uncalled, not where the scions of her father's kin were concerned.

 ** _Such are the rewards of monarchy and its burdens_** , crooned the being that had saved her to scorn her and set to her Eldar-sport in choices. Rewards and burdens indeed. Her hand moved from playing with the white streak, and she stepped out.

"Celebrimbor," her deep voice intoned, and her husband and the Forge-master turned to her.

"I wish to speak with you, and then with my husband."

With a look of uncertainty in his eye, Celebrimbor followed her into the bedchamber, his eyes drawn to her, yes, for a part of him did see her as hauntingly beautiful beyond words, but drawn most to the streak of white in her hair, a sight that brought a mixture of pain, shame, and guilt.

Then Galadriel spoke and asked him the questions he'd been dreading for over a century of mortal time having to answer, asked it bluntly, and there was a sense of wariness and fear in her leavened, no doubt, by a contact with a Vardarin Maia who had an accursed blade in the dead of night under the droning chorus of the endless stars.


	8. The Dawn of the Kingdom of Muspeldor and the arrival of the Ten Thousand Riders:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Galadriel and Celebrimbor have a very important and very awkward talk. Ilmare, now Simmara, continues her work to delve into the foundations of Muspeldor, where she lays the foundation of the Tower of Fire, the Barad-Ruin, and to her mountains are drawn, among others, various surviving bands of the Eldar. From the south rides north, a half-century later, Neherzingetorix, Khagan of the Land-Sea, and the first stirrings of the star-song since the days of the Elder Age.

THE HALLS OF GALADRIEL AND CELEBORN, OST-IN-EDHIL, GALADRIEL'S BEDCHAMBER:

She had asked the question he had dreaded most. "What, if anything, is the nature of your heart toward me?' Her hand was tugging slightly on the white streak in her silver-gold hair, fingers twitching slightly, right eye twitching likewise in a slightly spastic fashion.

He paused, taking a deep breath, then spoke slowly and cautiously. "I think you are the fairest of them all in the Great Lands. And beyond that....I do love you, Artanis, in a way more than I do, or have, for any other Elleth of my acquaintance."

His eyes were closed and his hands trembled, and silence echoed for a long time, afterward, punctuated by Galadriel clearly and in a sense visible beyond the insight that went into Osanwe, collecting herself. She visibly made the effort to move her hand from her hair, and sighed.

"I was afraid of that."

Celebrimbor raised his hand and she was silenced for a moment.

"Do not think me guilty of the error of Maeglin for all of this. My father.....I know what he did to you, and I know how he did it, and I know why. And I know beforehand the stories of what was so with my grandfather and you."

He gulped, audibly, seemingly feeling visibily nauseous. "It was wrong, and my family's treatment of one who is our own kin is itself a part of the evils of the curse, and the evils that have been within us. Maeglin, for all that he loved the daughter of Turgon, he did not yield to his lust, or so it is said, nor try to, until after _she_ took him captive." Galadriel nodded, a bitterness leavened with sorrow in both their eyes, for the fate of Aredhel was one that haunted them, exposing old myths and raising deep uncertainties as to what the laws and customs of the Quendi held being truth in spirit or merely in belief, and in the nature of beings powerful enough for belief to become as truth.

"I love you, and there is a bit of desire, and of romance that could have been but will never be there."

He looked at his hands, rough and calloused as were those of his grandfather before him and others of the sons of their lineage, perusing the callouses and the deep brownish hue of the skin like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

"But I will not hurt you. I came to Doriath, all those years ago, as the only one of my family welcomed there not because of feelings for you, because they did not develop until much later, but out of shame of what my family was, what they became, what they made themselves, all of us, into."

Those hands clenched and he took a low and deep breath.

"Our families all suffered. You as well as I." He looked at her, and she at him, and what he had expected to see, hostility, was replaced by a blend of sorrow, understanding, even compassion. "We are....." he breathed deeply again. "We are the last of our families in the Great Land, bar Gildor. And of course, the Peredhils." That last pair of words brought a sharp and bitter laugh. "Poor bastards, them. They have Maia blood, and of the tribe of Valinor of the Fallen, no less. Good people, very good. Perhaps the greatest of us, and yet if the star-song should ring again and new monsters from the south ride north, it will be too easy to blame them, rather than anything, or anyone, else."

A sorrowful laugh followed the bitter one. "We're all cursed in our own ways. You are accursed for spilling blood in the sacred lands on the side of the right. No flexibility in the Valar, though not to us is it given to judge the Lords of the West. All the same, they condemn you for shielding your uncle from my father, who sought to harm you so the way they do my family for launching the rebellion and bringing you to that point. My family, of course, are accursed for being kinslayers, for letting the Oath drive us to wanton cruelty. The House of Fingolfin accursed for our dear uncle's success and that of our kindred against the Fallen, and no more to be here until the end of all things." 

Her eyes remained to meet his. "And you, accursed from the beginning with a thing we all understand now, in the wake of war. First condemned for yourself when you were a woman greater than many men and scorned for it. Then for not seeing glory in kinslaying and only the blood and the smell and the..." he broke off, weeping for a moment, as she moved closer to him, though he did not see this. "Now we all know what it is that you endure, and another sign of why the Gift of the Second-born is one they will ever be able to properly appreciate."

"They have relief from those things, in the end. If perhaps greater intensity than most of us. Those of us who endured the wars of the Elder Age? It will never leave us. I remember the sight of my father hurting you, and of the look in your eyes afterward. No matter what else I felt, or would feel, I would remember that moment, and the sight of my kin going for me, personally."

_"Father! Father no!"_

_Curufin looked up with an arrogant look in his eyes from the bleeding wreck that he'd made of one of the last two of the children of the House of Finarfin left._

_"You can't do this! This is the kind of folly that doomed Gondolin! Haven't we fallen enough?"_

_His eyes burned seemingly illuminated by a hellish light akin to the stars._

_"You betrayed our line, my son." The blade that had carved the word into Galadriel's shoulder rose up._

_"You of all people should know that the sins of the fathers are passed unto the sons, unto the third and fourth generations!"_

_Celebrimbor raised his own sword, a thing of Doriath's forge, hallowed by no less than Melian itself. It was a sword that had a hilt of Galvorn, a priceless thing of the make of the Avari, and a blade blessed by the shining light of Aman, that echoed in a purity unlike the diseased light and chorus of the stars._

_Curufin hissed with audible pain, the light blinding him, and seeming to burn his eyes and his flesh with its gaze._

_"I will not fight you by choice, Father, but you will either flee, or we shall cross swords."_

_Curufin snarled, and then strode away, and it was Celebrimbor and his blade that ended up finding a means to shield others of the survivors in the Marshes._

_Alone among his family, he found not merely hiding within the Girdle, but active redemption._

"I remember it, too. You stopped him from going.....further."

She placed her hand on his shoulder, a gesture of gentle strength and deft assurance. Quietly she called in Celeborn, who stepped in, and to Celebrimbor's surprise did so in tunic and trousers, not the armor he'd feared.

"It is because you saved my wife from your father that I have done nothing more than frown, Celebrimbor." Celeborn's voice was surprisingly gentle, given circumstances.

"Why are you so calm about this?"

"You had a chance, in the Marshes, to do whatever you wanted with impunity, the way the rest of your kin did."

Celeborn's lips were stoic, his expression inscrutable.

"The hostility, too, you must understand, is at least something of the public. Your family is not welcomed, nor trusted, among many in the Great Lands. To give you too active a welcome, and to give the son of Curufin too much overt trust, given your father's deeds, would lead to questions and to intrigue in the High King's court that cannot be afforded."

Celebrimbor raised an eyebrow.

"So then you do trust me?"

Celeborn nodded. "You earned that trust when you saved my wife, and kept her and my family safe while I was fighting with Dior."

Celebrimbor sighed in relief.

"I am honored, Lord Celeborn, that it be so."

Then he showed them the plans for a concept that would come to pass in the future, and the eyes of the Lord and Lady of the future realm of Laurelindinorean met each other's gaze, and then they nodded.

"Can you do this?"

"I am centuries away from it, if that close. But eventually, yes."

"You would entrust us with a great honor," Celeborn mused.

"It is only fitting that those who have endured so much suffering should get some reward for all of this."

Celeborn and Galadriel looked at the image. A Ring of adorned with a stone of adamant, made of wrought mithril. The design of the Rings was never the issue, it was mere metallurgy, To call the power of the Song of the Ainur and to work it into the metal without the power destroying the metal and the forge, that was always the concept. And what the Ring could be used _for....._

Galadriel quietly then told Celebrimbor and Celeborn both of the strange conversation and encounter with the spawn of Ungoliant, the scene of the giant in the form of molten lava with Nightfall unsheathed, the words, and her openly confessing to what Celeborn and Galadriel, at least, had had very good reason to suspect.

They did not endure the encounter in the forest, but the imagery of the smothering Unlight, and the thing that had strode in in skin dark as night save the hellish red gleam of molten fires, and the terror of Nightfall and its doing its task, the strange words spoken....

'Shub-Niggurath,' the name was unlovely and it was unpleasant, and yet it held some element of truth. Ungoliant was said to have elements of a goat and a ram about the face, not least in the form of great horns, and a strange element of fur that appeared and disappeared as well. So too would it be so with her spawn. There was that sense of the shadowy Outside, a thing not of Arda nor of Arda's laws. A monster of the Outside, and one of the Inside, a thing of Starlight that had arisen in elemental fury. The incident left a sour taste in all their mouths. At the one hand, Nightfall retained its power of dread destruction. At another, what had been fearsome in the Elder Age had become moreso now, as if one of the greater among the Valar walked as a spirit of fire and fury.

At the other, she had saved Galadriel and even healed her when she could have as easily killed her and blamed it on the spider, and there were the words of concern, of bitterness and sorrow, and of hope that destiny would not lay the same chains in a new form.

Celebrimbor did not care, in truth, no matter who she was, or what she was. She was offering him power, and in the wake of these Rings, even her flames would be held at bay by the power of Nenya, Vilya, and Narya. And in the very offering of that which was not merely good, but the dream of the Quendi unfulfilled.....

They remained uncertain all the same. Not long thereafter Aurelian had returned, and spent two years with him delving into deeper arts and elements of the harmonics, insights that would prove crucial to the future and to his path, though only the very first steps. In the light of her eyes, and in the sense of hope and dreams awoken by her speech, he deemed the Bearer of the Word by far the kindest and wisest of all the spirits of the Maiar, and the ambitions kindled led him that evening to firm up new concepts. _Three Rings for the Elves, under the Sky. Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone. Nine for mortal Men doomed to die._

A mantra that had echoed in his ears when she had spoken it, then. A vision. The Free Peoples united by great deeds that would bring Arda to glory greater than that of the Lords of the West, and with far less ruin. 

TO THE NORTHWEST OF AMON AMARTH: 

She had spent a couple of years, recently, giving aid and counsel to Celebrimbor, who remained deeply buried into parsing the art of the Rings she had proposed. It was no simple task to bind the power to limit death and decay, after all. It required the Quendi to go against that purpose to which Eru had assigned them, first. And then when that power was summoned to be able to bind and wield it to great effect. There had been....accidents...and cases where that power had erupted in harmonics not of her mother's make but with distorting and warping effects. Forests that had become alive, Huorns, as they would be called in later ages. Both the Onodrim and the Entwives had come to the newly altered forests, speaking and bringing containment and calm.

After that last incident, she had made a point to head to the south for what she'd termed a journey of both discovery and of exploration of the unknown lands and cultures of the Haradrim. It had been an act of pride, and of folly, to have disclosed who she had been, and what she had been, to Artanis of Doriath. She knew that one level, and yet for all that, nothing had happened. Celebrimbor had looked at her with suspicion but when she'd given him access to insights at a fundamental level, that power and arrogance and temptation at the heart of his family had overcome the rest.....the mantra she had begun to incorporate in speeches and in the star-song that rippled into his dreams (and this if nothing else was a taste, though incomplete, of the power her mother had taken for granted)....she smirked. Rings for each of the Free Peoples, indeed. A snare to bring them all and in the star-song bind them. 

She had begun to study the arts of magic, the kind of power that Thuringwethil, among others of the Dawn-Time had taken for granted. She would never equal Mairon's grasp of the music, but....she reflected. She did not truly need to. The sword Nightfall was part of why, so too the power placed within her soul. She would be able to aspire to a kind of grasp of harmonics that would burn more brightly than Mairon's, and one that would add to great strength in limb and sword, that in magic that would compensate where the other two could not.

To the South she had come, to the land that in later years would become Muspeldor, the fearsome Land of the Fire-Demons, the World-Ravagers kept at bay by the fearsome skills of Westernesse and its successor states, and a foe of all that was good and holy. Amon Amarth she had kindled with ease. It was one of a chain of mountains of its kind, and with more of them she unveiled Nightfall from its scabbard, and the sword's fires kindled their flames, kindled them and warped them and altered them. An unintended consequence of this would become the vast granary and farmlands tended by future slaves, no small part of the vast legions of the South and the East she would sustain in future wars.

For now there was almost a childish delight. A giant of magma-form walked and jumped across mountains, the sword descending with the edge into the mountains and blazing, and fire and smoke rising. She laughed, rejoicing in the heat and welcoming it as a friend.

Starlit nights came and she wandered in the East, beginning to focus on the power of magic, carving great bricks and empowering them with spells not simply of her mother's make, but dark and twisted equivalents of the kind that were used by Melkor and Aule. A power awoke, then, coming at last to one that would make a call upon it, for the spirit of malice was multi-faceted and the original design of the Allfather for its shape could not in truth be denied for all time. Each night under the stars dreadful harmonics of ethereal beauty but also a cold and shattering ugliness echoed and bricks were laid, the ground becoming molten and warped into a kind of mystical concrete, a work of trances beneath the stars.

The Fallen was beyond the doors but hers the song that echoed in glory and triumph at the work that unfolded, brick by brick.

When it was done, it was a brilliant night beneath the endless fields of stars, and she held her hands upward, her shape whispy darkness on the outside that billowed like smoke but shaped and illuminated by starlight that arced and curved as of spacetime-distortion, when her ears and her new senses detected motion.

Her hand went to the hilt of Nightfall and she turned, her eyes gazing in wonder.

 _ **Eldar.So not all of them had been destroyed in the War of Wrath**_ , she mused. 

They were great hulking things, something akin to the Quendi in form but taller. Seven to seven and a half feet in height, broader and bulkier (and even as their power would dwindle in the wake of the Third Age and they would shrink to under the height of Men, their weight and bulk would increase more greatly and their strength with it, a thing that made them unlovely and yet forces to behold). To her surprise, too, they were not mere hundreds, they were thousands, even tens of thousands. A far cry of an army of tens of millions, and amplified by including Eldar Maidens and their young. Of the sword-bearers, there were but approximately five-thousand. All that was left of the old sixty millions that had waged the great God-War. 

The Eldar leader stepped forward, clad in rough garments of the hide of some kind of animal, and then knelt before her.

"Our Queen and our Maker, we herald your return."

His words were low and guttural, amplified by the fangs that extended from his jaw, two tusk-like ones extending with greater prominence.

"I am Elladan, eldest son of Elrond, greatest of our kings in the First Age. I am pleased to see that the scion of the Traitor did not kill you."

Her eyes met his, and the star-song seemed to strengthen the Eldar, and she pointed to her mountains.

_**I give you a home, here. Seek to rebuild your strength. Make new recruits. Build your power and your glory anew and forge great swords.** _

Elladan's smile was cold.

"My young son, Elrohir, has great ambitions."

_**Oh?** _

"He wishes to capture the Dwarf-Fortress of Gundabad, and to build a realm of his own. For now, though, Khazad-Dum is too strong."

She nodded.

_**Regain your strength, first. A far height have the Eldar fallen.** _

She raised Nightfall from its scabbard and with graceful curves carved runes in various of the mountains ringing Muspeldor.

_**Here. Go forth and seek to each of these mountains.** _

With roars of delight they moved, and within the mountains around Muspeldor-that-would-be, the Eldar began to sing their songs in praise of the Star-Kindler, and old evils took their first tentative steps to regain strength.

S.A. 201:

She had known, from her delving into magic, of many things and gained an ability to know from the stars as her mother had known. It was thus that she had learned of Neherzingetorix the Skulltaker, as he would come to be known, and of his wars against other Haradrim. He had taken to himself a title, Khagan, as it would be named in the Red Book, and in translations thereof given that his were a people of the steppe and the association of pyramids of skulls with the legacies of Atilla and of Genghis Khan. In the original language it was simply Rix, and it was part of his name.

Great horns had echoed, trumpeting a clarion call outside the mountains of Muspeldor, and it was her that strode to meet the horde beneath its torches and the light and hunger of the Starlight.

Neherzingetorix was a great hulking mountain of a man, stout and less overtly muscular, but with a strength matched only by Turin the Dragonslayer and Beren the One-Handed of the Men of the Elder Age, and by Ar-Pharazon the Master of Mankind in later years. The right half of his face was burned, blackened and charred beneath the cheek to the jawline. A ritual burning given to commemorate his victory, and in honor of the Star-Kindler herself, the great Goddess whose image had inspired and continued to inspire him. His armor was wrought of iron but painted with swirling stars, in some portions, around the breast, with greaves and gauntlets and boots likewise. Otherwise it, as with others of the Haradrim, was of mail. In the Third Age, later Commorian armies and their like would march in full plate armor, but such was not yet within their ability to manufacture in the dawn of the Second Age.

His steed likewise was a great hulking thing with eyes that seemed to glow and a burning on its own jaw that marked it in the eyes of Neherzingetorix and his followers as Blessed. His riders were ten thousand strong, a small shadow of the future that would march as infantry and in great cataphractii akin to medieval knights and were among the most fearsome and abhorred of the foes faced by the Free Peoples.

His Ten Thousand and he had come to the Realm of the Singing Mountains, which echoed with the glorious music of the spheres. And now before them they saw a giant of starlight and smoke-like darkness, her very flesh and motion echoing with star-song. Like the images from beyond the stars made flesh she was, and she drew from her side a great sword that blazed with a wondrous heat that both was and wasn't of star-make.

"Nightfall," the word echoed. The fabled sword the star-song spoke of, the sword to burn the world in fire.

**_In the name of my mother, she who is to the Gods known as Bharadaz of the Outer Darkness, Star-Kindler, Ever-White, the High One, I grant to thee, O Neherzingetorix of Harad and to thy riders my blessing. Ride as the hosts of Hell, and bring liberation and the glories of the Star-Song! Go forth as the first shadow of the star-song that begins to awaken, instill fear, instill horror, such that never shall they who dwell in the North cease to look to the South in fear and trembling!_ **

The horns echoed in a clarion call to war and horror, a thunderclap in the smoke-dotted skies over Muspeldor, where hellish flames blazed to match the glory of Nightfall, and thunderous tectonic sounds echoed as the Ten Thousand of Neherzingetorix rode forward.

Sinmara of Muspeldor looked with a vicious smile, starlight gleaming in that wide u-shaped pattern like that of her mother before her, and a great and thunderous laughter echoed with a mad warble, and the very mirror of the voice of the Elentari herself was in that laughter, as the star-song pulsed and echoed in a fearsome crescendo.

The first of the Middle Men to know of the ride of the Skulltaker and his monsters was a small village set just to the north of the Falls of Rauros. Twilight had sunk into nighttime and it was a clear night, so no decent people were out beneath the stars, here in the far reaches of the south, near the Fire-Realm that had begun to burn with a terrible heat and smoke that rose as a vision of ancient nightmares of the Dawn-Age. Then the terrible horns of the Skulltaker echoed with a sound like a shrieking howl of the damned and tormented in the ancient Angband of old, and the thunder of hooftbeats and the burning of torches began to drive the Middle Men out of their village, and as they fled, the Skulltaker and his riders dismounted and raised scimitars of iron that seemed crude yet ruggedly strong and raised them.

Then the butchery began and with it another burning, and the offering made to the Star-Kindler burned with a terrible heat that left a blackened ground beneath it that rang in fear and in horror. and into the great horse-country that would become the land of Rohan rode the Ten Thousand, and from there, the butchery and the burning began to raise new clouds of smoke that drew the eyes not just of Middle-Men, but of the Quendi kingdoms, and especially both Khazad-Dum and its great friends and enemies, depending on the whim of the Dwarf-Kings from day to day. Immediately they grasped the similarity to the first raid of the Haradrim, but this was different. Larger-scale, more fearsome.


	9. Dreams of Fire and Pyramids of Skulls:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The War with Neherzingetorix sees the first great muster of the Quendi and the Khazad, and great and terrible atrocities that depopulate for a time all of southern Middle Earth of Men. Dreams stalk the night, dreams of a giant of fire with a sword of flame and the world burned to nothingness.

S.A. 201-211:

For ten years did Neherzingetorix and his Ten Thousand run on a rampage across the fuller expanses of the South. It was their burning and their actions that would leave much of the realm of Rohan's southern environs haunted by the crumbling ruins of settlements of the ancestors of Dunlendings who had been at the edge of becoming a farming people, of settled and prosperous agrarian nature. They had burned first in what Neherzingetorix called the Great Offering. Their settlements together totalled near seventy-thousand, the most dense cluster of settlement south of Eregion and Lindon and beyond the Dwarf-realms.

Seventy thousand skulls were erected into a single towering pyramid over a period of seven days, beneath the shouts and howls and baying of Neherzingetorix's hordes. So lost did they become in star-mad slaughters that their armies that moved in a precise discipline that would not be matched even by the later horse-hordes of the Star-King and his peoples that laid siege to the Realm of Gondor, and indeed until the age of Genghis Khan in the later years dismounted and became monsters in armor with great and crude swords that burned and slaughtered and destroyed for destruction's sake.

The Dunlendings' settlements that had been painstakingly created over the last centuries of the Elder Age and the first two of the current Age were obliterated so utterly that never again would the Dunlendings themselves build settlements, though their later kin the Hobbits of the Shire and the Men of Dale and Bree would go on to do so. From here, the armies of Neherzingetorix spread into bands, ravaging and destroying wherever they found civilizations of Men. Yet the regions of Quendi they shunned and none dared to go near the Mountain-Kings, as they termed the Khazad.

Aurelian, the self-proclaimed Bearer of the Word, was absent, and only news of an encounter with a fearsome being wielding a great flaming sword came in debased echoes of their encounter, in the events of this decade. Yet in the south, the realm ringed by mountains as three sides of a square gradually began to see flames erupt from the mountains, as a dense and hellish light gleamed by forces and by power unknown.

At the end of the first year the Alliance of the Elves and Dwarves was sealed and under High King Gil-Galad, the full weight of the Elves was joined to the full weight of the Dwarves, assembled as they would not be again until the War of the Dwarves and Eldar of the Third Age. With them those more courageous of the Middle-Men, and those with the least to lose, gathered. The Great Alliance would spend another nine years driving the legions of Neherzingetorix to ground, and in the Forests of the Enedwaith they were finally brought to ruin in the multi-month Battle of the Enedwaith after a decade of brutal slaughters and rampages, the star-madness that overtook them driving them feral and rendering them vulnerable to the more disciplined armies of the Free People, though the horrors they unleashed both brought a disgust that made any concept of quarter impossible and intensified the wrath of both sides against each other.

Ten years of great horror that were akin to the War of the Dawn-Age, and when Celebrimbor and his Noldorin fighters, all of them disciplined survivors of the armies that fought against the Fallen and the Feanorians alike, took the field in the fifth year their power was such that no force of merely human nature could withstand them nor the fearsome aspects of the last of the Feanorians clad in armor and helm, nor the fell power worked within his blade. Not since the bitter stalemate in the Ossiriand had the sons of Feanor in any sense taken the field against the Enemy, even in a more merely human sense, and yet against them humanity proved incapable of withstanding the forces of the last of the Feanorians and where his reputation became known, so ceased the ravages of Neherzingetorix the Skulltaker.

it is said that among the terrors of the Battle of the Enedwaith was a group of trees in the northern forest that cast a great shadow around them and spoke in creaking voices of malice to match the works of the Enemy, yet they were not of any Enemy force, and where they moved, not even the bodies of the Skulltaker's Riders were ever found.

The Skulltaker himself chose to duel not the last of the Feanorians but the High King of the Quendi, and for nine hours they fought in a duel of superlative skill, the raw strength of the Skulltaker greater, but the ferocity and star-madness that pursued him meant that where he had a tremendous strength to endure harm, he was a frenzied force whose swings were never able to connect with anything vulnerable, while the runes on the High King's shield warded the shield and the High King from true harm.

Nine hours did they duel, a duel that was renowned in song of Elven and Mannish make, for the Fall of the Skulltaker was one that brought hope and memories of the troublesome era of the Dawn-Time, when monsters as his horde represented were not aberrations and atavism in red horror and the reeking pyramids that were left as monuments to their destruction, but a thing that trawled the world and made its horrors still greater. Sparks of light from the runes on the shield, the blood of the Skulltaker running in rivers down his flesh and making him more angered and more frenzied and yet....a normal Man could not have sustained such a fight under such wounds for as long as he did.

The degree to which he had become something abnormal, and of a most profound kind, was evident when his eyes shone with a hellish light and his mouth, the voice raspier and guttural reflecting the horrid burn on his right cheek, echoed in the praise of the 'Star-Kindler, Mistress of the Great Music, who seeks to burn the world in ashes!'

And yet with deftness and silence and his own eyes seeming to flash with the light of Aman, Gil-Galad withstood the blows and dealt his own, blows that slowly sapped the strength of his foe, and then with one last stroke of his sword the Skulltaker's own head was hewn from his shoulders, and the fate that he had dealt to others was dealt to himself.

Ten years of slaughter ended in the shadowy creaking song of trees awoken as Huorns, and in an Elven sword that flashed with light of hallowed nature bringing the fearsome Skulltaker to the ground, in the movements of Elves and Dwarves, and the flash of Dwarven Axes and Elven swords and the songs of Elven bows.

Great melancholy came in the wake of the first of the great Wars of the Second Age, and what was in retrospect the first of the movements of Sinmara of Muspeldor against her foes. Lamentations were made, the Dunlendings in the South becoming nomads anew, the glories that could have been forgotten and only statues of Pukel-men lingering as traces of the fallen realm in time to come. The monstrous pyramids were toppled, and among those who lent aid to this was no less than Aurelian of Valinor, as she called herself, who came with look of sorrow and grief upon her face. Nightfall remained in its scabbard but she kindled flames that lit the pyres of what had been the pyramids, and from this came the first stages of what would become the Dead Marshes.

The reminder of the power of Star-Madness that rode on swift horses and left blood to dye the ground and the pyramids of severed heads so reminiscent of the aftermath of the Nirnaeth led to an intensification of effort on the part of Celebrimbor to decipher the secrets of Ring-Making. Words of benediction and of calming soothing nature did Aurelian speak in turn, as she became a figure of reverence to Men, and more than this to the Elves of the South, who found in her light a hypnotic power that spoke to them with a thing that made her words seem sweet and of great honor no matter what the words were, nor how they were spoken.

THE DREAMS OF EREINION: 

Ereinion Gil-Galad did not sleep easily, even now, two years after the duel with the Skull-Taker that was already becoming a thing of story and of song.

He was having one of the new nightmares that stalked his nights.

A shining being akin to Aurelian but not her strode into his palace, a gleaming ring on her finger. It was a band of seeming gold, unadorned, until he saw it begin to blaze with an incantation.

Bright her light was, in this dream, and as splendid and terrible as the Hunter he remembered so well from Valinor in the days of the War of Wrath.

At her side the scabbard and the dreadful sword.

She raised that sword, Nightfall rippling into flame, and her light shifted. Her outer dimensions were defined by a darkness that billowed as with smoke and her flesh seemed shaped by a blend of armor and starlight, and he heard triumphant laughter.

The Ring of Erinti gives me a mind of my own at last, after a thousand years of my mother's work!

She has failed to overawe me, and now, I shall go not to her wars but to mine! I have humbled myself for scorn and hatred and contempt from those who were given great honors.

Nightfall blazed with dreadful power, the buildings around the Palace scorching and fire flowing around his walls.

Hithlum, this great capital you've named for the fallen kingdom of the Dawn-Age, burns!

Nightfall descended and its edge shattered the foundation of the palace and fire was all around him and he felt then what that fire did to souls and at least, mercifully, did not even have time to sc-

He awoke, panting in fear. No extra heat in the palace, and the cloud-cover, a blessing of the Lord of the Seven Winds, muffled the voice of the stars that echoed with low thrums that were like small thunderclaps of menace.

THE DREAMS OF GALADRIEL AND CELEBORN:

They were sharing dreams, a not-uncommon thing in their marriage. Galadriel's nightmares, so frequent where she slept on her own, were almost never there where their dreams were shared. And yet......

In the dream it was not the forest and the spider, a dream that stalked Galadriel's nights on the times where her husband was apart from her. It was another place, desolate and barren, the gardens of the Entwives laid low and fallow, blackened trees standing as lonely sentinels of the shadows. A great giant had laid low the place with flaming sword, and a lonely wind sobbed lamentations for the fallen realm of the Entwives, no longer the ironically named 'Brown Lands' but the Ashfall, northern borders of the realm lit by terrible fires and smoke.

A nameless place as yet, but one of a great and brooding fear. Something moved in the shadows, and there was a deep booming sound, and it seemed like a great being made of coal moved, even with the light that lit from her flesh, rippling like streams of reddish flames that gleamed and illuminated a shape that was loosely humanoid and dreadful. In her hand gleamed Nightfall, and the light of her eyes matched the gaping chasm that rippled fire and marked her appearance as a great demon of the Fallen. The Balrogs were fearsome beings but they were as much shadow as light.

This was Annihilation, World-Destruction in a primordial form, a great two-hander for mortals held in a clawed hand with six fingers, the eyes gleaming with hellish triumph.

The being that strode toward them made the earth shake with the force of her tread. The ground shattered beneath her steps, each of the feet likewise between the feet of a bird and the branches of a tree.

The thing smiled as Nightfall drowned out the starlight, and their breathing began to suffer.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. Among the chorus of the Ainur was I in the dawn-time, and I am the last of my kind to walk the Earth in visible flesh and power and majesty, clad in the shapes of mine own thought and of mine own will. I am the architect of Fate, the destroyer who remakes all things by the will of the Allfather. All your kind shall fade, creatures of the Firstborn. I am the scourge of Eru, if you did not commit such sins in his sight, He would not have sent me among you!

Then she was towering over them and they looked at her in fear as she raised the great sword of fire.

Then a song echoed, silvery and brilliant, akin to that of Luthien whom Galadriel had known of old as friend and confidant. A figure stood between them and the giant, a towering Man beside her, a visible image of Kingship clad in mail with a star shining at his head with pure light.

A deep bestial snarl echoed instead of the voices and yet the song of Luthien grew the louder and for just a moment within time, she caught a glimpse of the ageless being that had arisen in her dream.

Grandmother. 

Her eyes blinked. That couldn-

THE HOUSE OF ELROND, IMLADRIS:

Arwen Undomiel awoke in her own bed, staring around widely, panting in fear, her hair slick against her body. She had seen....Something. In that dream. A giant of fire whose presence carried a low rumbling sound like an endless reverberating bass note that made reality tremble and her teeth and bones ache. It was trying to scare her grandmother, to see if it could kill in Lorien's realm. She wasn't going to risk her grandmother, if she could stop it,and so she had strode out of her own dreams into her grandmother's, a power she had heard whispered of as but one of many things Melian's lineage could do. An image had joined her of one who did not yet exist, and was two ages from doing so. Her destiny, and they had faced a giant of fire with a sword meant to burn the world.

She had sang of the Lay of Leithian and of the power of Tinuviel's voice.

She had sung of the time when her ancestor and in appearance, her perfect mirror had come before the Hall of the High One herself:

 _'Her voice came dropping down like rain into pools, profound dark, as her court were cast down in slumber and fires quenched, and the Silmarils blazed and echoed with a song of light and holiness, the stars in their courses within the Iron Crown_.

This line among others had made the creature mad, and then she had seen the scars around its neck that gleamed suddenly with light. A mauling, a jagged light that gleamed with an eldritch howl.

She had made it mad, whatever it was.

That morning she went to speak to her father and her grandfather Maglor, and counsels were held in silence, though no foe came for a century. And then one day, to the day of the original string of nightmares, night fell earlier than usual, unnaturally so, as if it were a great enchantment, (for it was).

MUSPELDOR: 

It was then that the eyes of the being who would come to be known as Sinmara, who had been meditating that night in a trance in the foundations of the Tower of Flame, flashed open. That prophecy, the words of the last son of Feanor on this side of the gulf between the God-Land and the Great-Lands.

Absently her hand flashed to her throat, where her light blazed in a jagged and horrid fashion and thrummed with a more terrible sound than most. She winced, though the wound had scarred and it was but the traces of the teeth of Huan. She _knew_ that song, though it was not the long-dead Nightingale herself whose voice had echoed with it, but another. Her visible image was that of Luthien reborn, a perfect duplicate in all ways. Her voice was lower, slightly, and throatier, but the Song, the Song, the accursed Song....

Her eyes opened, from the trance, shining with a terrible glory.

As a great and towering giant she rose, past the height of a grown bull Mumak, and her face, no longer even partially or mostly human. Two mouths opened with diagonal rows of multiple fangs that shone, an image to match the shapes of terror she'd glimpsed in her mother's thought.

The damned song and the memory of being cast down, her throat bleeding, being told to discard her realm that she had built, and then what happened af-

She roared, an echoing howl that smote the skies. At high noon the bellowed shriek echoed outward like a thunderclap on a cloudless clear day, echoing further and further north.

Into Tol Eressea and beyond into Valinor it echoed, a small and muted thunderclap.

Melian froze, and wept, recognizing the sound and the wrath therein, and felt a deep grief, though not as deep nor close to it as that which still haunted her where her husband, Elu Thingol, was concerned.

The Valar heard the sound, and for the first time in the wake of the sudden onrushing wave of the souls of Men and Elves and even a few Dwarves, they looked at each other and would summon the Mahanxanar. If a new distant light of the hellish make of the Fallen did begin to burn, they would need to devise a plan. Too much had been lost in the War of Wrath to risk such a thing anew, and the Doom of Mandos that held over the World-Destroyer in any event would make it unnecessary if she should arise again.

The first sign, the wave from the first of the raids, had been disconcerting. Neherzingetorix the Skulltaker was a second and more ominous sign, though the Valar dismissed it, for a time, as a human that had found a statue of the Fallen and gone mad from her radiation, and as he had gone mad, no outward agency was needed to explain the rampage, nor the kind of horrors unleashed with it.

For centuries more this view held as the Quendi of Eregion began to devote their full measure to the concept of the Rings and their Power grew, and with it a consciousness that at last, for the first time since the folly of Feanor, that the Elves were seeking to challenge the Lords of the West in their own domain. And at last news came to Valinor following a strange incident, not the incident with the House of FIndor that had seemed straightforward, a Fallen Maia with a sword of fire indulging in wanton savagery for its own sake.

A century after the rampage of Neherzingetorix the Skulltaker, Lindir, guardian of the young offspring of the Peredhil lineage Arwen Undomiel, youngest of the family, reported a strange thing when his soul came to Mandos with its elements charred. Between that report, the roar that had echoed as a peal of thunder in broad daylight where not a cloud dwelt, and the progress of the concept of the Rings, it was clear that a dim trace of the Fallen was stirring.

The question of what to do and how to do it had become not the theoretical statements of Orome and Nessa and Tulkas, but a practical one, and the dilemmas were not simple ones, nor swiftly resolved even b the standards of Valarin time.


	10. Undomiel and the Jotunn of the Muspilli:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the incident in Galadriel's dream, curiosity overtakes Sinmara of Muspeldor. She sets an ambush for a group of Quendi from Rivendell riding toward Ost in Edhil. Destiny's iron wheel takes its first spin.

S.A. 315:

FIFTEEN MILES WEST OF OST IN EDHIL: 

The invitation had been a strange one, conveyed in Osanwe, and the sense of emotions there had left Kemenrod of Rivendell deeply disturbed. His was a land strong in lore and song, but not in swords. It had a few march-wardens and march-forces all the same, and these were sent. He had never heard the kind of emotions here in his mother-in-law's voice, and there was a brooding sense of menace. The cloud-cover of Manwe had broken the night prior, and the star-song had changed. The chorus of the Fallen had been an endless droning of low and hypnotic power. This was a set of rumbles like the feral snarl of a deranged beast.

There were fifteen Quendi riding that day, riding swiftly. They had made shelter under the trees on the first day, and the second, and now it was the third and it was noon-time, the shadows on the Earth beneath the eye of Arien at their lowest ebb. Arwen Arien, as she was named by her parents, was but a child in the days of the Quendi, the youngest of her family, and she had found a means to contact her grandmother's dream and there encountered a monster. None of this was known but Kemenrond suspected at least some of it. The forest brooded and there was a heat within it that made the trees shudder and moan in fear, the low and guttural echoes between the peal of thunder and the low and sonorous howl of the great leviathans of the sea.

Of the fourteen besides Arwen Arien, only one was a veteran of the First Age and the Elder Age's wars. And it was he who was most cautious and paranoid, for he was one of the very few people who had had the misfortune, in the old fortress of Orodreth, to have faced the eldritch power of the Muspellir and survived. All he'd gained for his troubles was a horrid burn across his back and part of his arms and legs. Nienna and Este of the Valier had healed that wound but at times it pained him. And it pained him most now, like a sadistic echo of the old ages, and of the old sorrows.

There were no sounds of birds or beasts in the forest, only the low groaning of the trees, though there had been plentiful in the prior two days. The stillness grew and so did a strange heat, and it was the awareness of that heat growing at the height of noon even amidst the shade of the trees that had the Elves drawing together. All of the men were veterans of wars, the recent one against Neherzingetorix if not the First Age. Arwen Arien was in the midst of a circle of very well-armed Elves when she turned and her eyes were drawn to the east, with a gaze of surpassing intensity matching only that of the others of her lineage.

Trees were crackling and the undergrowth was moving, and before the being that was moving came a sudden rush of animals, the fear within them palpable. The Elves bandied together and such was their harmony with life that the animals moved around them and none of them were in serious danger. Still the crackling followed and there was a sensation of motion, and then there was laughter, low and rumbling, and yet for all that having a distinctly feminine aura.

It began as low chuckling, the guttural rock-impacts of boulders falling from cliffs, and became a staccato sequence of acorns falling on stones, and then an echoing contralto maelstrom. Fire suddenly echoed with it, the fire having a strangely-

"Oh shit," cursed the veteran of the First Age, the word safely in Quenya, which even most of the sword-wielders of the House of Rivendell did not (yet) speak. Only Arwen Arien knew what word was said and she froze, her fear palpable. Anything that could make the stoic figure she knew so well that afraid enough to talk like the soldier he-

To the east the forest burned with an eerie rumbling sound and light stalked toward them with its presence an audible slap against not just ears but minds. 

"Shit!"

Only he had seen what moved toward them, the other Elves had not. She looked like a woman, after a fashion, clad in plate armor that was a brilliant hue that both was and was not gold. The armor was hauntingly beautiful, and fearsome, for its legacy was well understood, and even those who had not met the being that wore that armor knew of it, and knew what the sword that had burned the forest with it was. Nightfall. The woman had skin of whispy smoke as a great blurred outline, eyes that were like supernovas, a mouth that was a curved galaxy ripped into the shape of a terrifying leer. She was gigantic, at least four times the size of a grown Man, and her motions echoed and rang with a fearsome noise that cast a curiously hypnotic sense about her, like the air thickened.

_**Well, well. Isn't this a moment for old times? The Utumnonatari in the woods encountering Luthien Tinuviel fleeing like a fugitive from her father's house?** _

The voice was sinister, a low contralto that sounded like that of the Children, but echoing with a malice and hatred that seemed to have a fire of its own, reality before the being shimmering with the distortion of a heat-mirage.

"Begone, monster, to the Outer Darkness with your Lady!"

The laughter pealed out again and the blade pressed against a tree that became ashes with its heat in a gesture of casual contempt.

**_She was liege of the forces of Ruin and she sought to warp me into becoming her daughter. She was never mine. Her heart beat only for the Lord of the Seven Winds, as she never tired of telling me._ **

The two Elven archers let fly with arrows and the terrible sword simply moved in two swift motions and ashes fell.

_**Arrows, really? I withstood the power of Mairon, servant of Melkor the Great King, in direct combat. I humbled him, I laid him low. Mightiest of all in Arda in the mechanisms of the song and he fled before me as a whipped cur.** _

The laughter again.

_**Next to that, little tree-rats, there is nothing that you and your kind can do.** _

One of the Elves gave a great shout of rage and launched himself at her with his sword a shining testament of the power of the light, in a mirror of the clash of Lord Fingolfin and the Star-Kindler in the old wars. With a snort of contempt her sword stabbed out and its heat smote him and he fell, burned to carbonized bones, as she looked at the frightened Elves.

**_Still your kind learns nothing. Splendid the heroism of the wars of Beleriand-that-was and it brought you the Burning. It brought you the Tears Unnumbered. Many are the Elves Nightfall has sent to Mandos as shrieking burned things, their souls laid waste._ **

The terrible sword moved out again and more of the Elves died, a horrid smell of burned flesh joining others in the woods near Ost-in-Edhil.

She could sense, now, that Galadriel knew of the presence of a powerful demon of the Fallen loose so near to her citadel. That she had donned armor well before the party knew she was there, and that she was moving with a swift speed, the speed that had made her desirable and unconquerable save by the will of one, and that even now she was hurling herself forward with a new sword to replace that sundered against the daughter of Ungoliant. She didn't care. 

_**A prophecy spoke, little girl, of Luthien reborn, last of her lineage, she who would kill me.** _

Three more movements of the terrible sword and now Arwen Arien faced exposed and alone the terrible colossus with whom her fate was intertwined. In later years she would do so taught in all the lore of Melian known to her grandmother and in the spirit of the power known to her lineage of the Peredhils. She would do so as an ancient foe drawn by destiny to reunite the sundered lineage of the Half-Elven in whose veins ran the blood of Melian and of her people. She would embrace destiny, and in the War of the Last Alliance by the distant ancestor and mirror in face of her fated one as she was of Luthien Tinuviel, fight by his side in the Dagorlad, and held then that her destiny had come true and yet it was not so.

Right now, she was an Elven child, and a very young Elven child, staring with utter horror and eyes gaping wide in woods burned to ashes, the burnt bones of Quendi around her and that horrid smell in her nose that she feared she would never, ever get out of it.

A giant stalked toward her with the Bane of Dor-Lomin gleaming and raised the sword high, a gleaming executioner's torch, and that smile blazed at her with the song of the starlight echoing.

Something awoke in her then and she became as a pillar of light as Luthien had been in that day, the giant that held the sword staring in wonder.

Her voice echoed with the ancient songs of her ancestors, and of all the songs wielded, it was one that had haunted her dreams before. The song that had laid low the Tor-Ni-Muspellir, and that song, and the mirror of Luthien in a mere child, and the memory of fangs at her throat had the giant in armor blink and close her eyes, and then suddenly it moved by thought-power far, far south. The light shifted briefly and for a moment her eyes went still wider.

"Aurelian?"

Something very strange had happened. A demon had come upon them in the woods and it was then that the pillar of light faded and Arwen looked around. The survivors of the expedition were badly burned and looking at her in wonder and an almost religious awe that had her uneasy. And then she looked and saw and smelled what was around her and fell to her knees, losing the fine meal she'd had earlier, and curled up just away from that, rocking and crying. Crying in another forest burnt to ashes, amidst burned bones and devastated bodies, as a legend had arisen out of the old days and it just.......

MUSPELDOR:

The throneroom would alter when it became a room in a proper sense at the very heart within the great Tower yet to be, yet it was with a vengeance and her own fires that Sinmara built for herself a throne, out of Obsidian, a surprisingly fragile and weak substance for so powerful a force. Yet it was a throne of sharpness that against any being of flesh would cut it to ribbons from the mere touch and against the flesh of the Ainur, of course, the forms of thought and the like, this meant nothing. She built the Obsidian Throne anew, then, and sank upon it in a great weariness.

Her throat still pained her, the teeth of the Hound there.

She trembled. For a moment, the star-madness had arisen as in the dawn-times and she had sought to kill a child, and somehow, after veteran soldiers had died or been rendered useless in war, that child had withstood her. Had sung _that_ song. The poor thing would be too traumatized to note accurately what happened, for a long time. Perhaps, given Quendi lifetimes, enough that the Rings would be made and when she grasped the means of engineering a Great Ring. she would be able to make a Ring of her own. The Ring of Erinti, she had mulled naming it. A Ring that would grant a power to master the world.

Well, for a certain definition. To be the last living thing on a realm of ashes and cinders was certainly mastery.

THE WOODS OUTSIDE OST-IN-EDHIL:

It was Galadriel herself, clad in plate armor of old Valinor, the armor she'd worn in the Kinslaying, who found her granddaughter and the scene of the carnage. Outside the burn-zone the woods endured strong if weeping in terror and fear.

She heard them speaking the word _Nightfall_ and pondered. The Utumnonatari lived, she knew that. She must have known of the prophecy and sought to betray it, and yet......

She paused, looking at her granddaughter, who pulled herself out of her curling upon herself and ran to her, weeping.

She looked around.

A scene of horrific carnage and a monster's path, and against her a single child, defenseless. Somehow, for some reason, she had not slain the child. Maybe, perhaps, there was hope for her.

She tried to make herself believe this, that the hollow sick feeling in her gut of the danger to her family and her kindred from the prophecy of Maglor was not yet another set of fetters from the Doom of Maglor. From her cursed uncle's lineage, once more drawing the Quendi to a dread fate. She wished that the line of Tar-Minyatur in the west, in the realm of Andor would produce a child like this, almost. Let the Men face this nightmare. Her family had.....

Then she remembered Melian, her kindness, the things she had taught her. Alone among the Quendi she had learned deeply enough that absent the gift of the Ainur she could face at least some Ainur on a relatively equal footing, for a short time. Her granddaughter trembled and wept, and she made a quiet wish to herself, not a vow, for she knew too well the dreadful power of an Oath or a vow, that if the monster came for her again, that Arwen Arien could meet her on an equal footing. If destiny wished such terrible fetters around her, she would give her the key to unlock them.

Arwen sensed some of the maelstrom, though she had no context to place a lot of it, and then the sudden decision made that cut like the terrible sword that would haunt her nightmares. She knew elements of what that meant, and she for a moment gave a nod that was not that of a child but of someone much older, and Galadriel then knelt beside her granddaughter and wept as she did.

MUSPELDOR:

Brooding on the Obsidian Throne, Ilmarë closed her eyes, shuddering, as her neck continued to pain her.

Then she opened them. It would be audacious, but it might help foster the greater schemes. Three centuries had lapsed and she had remained resistant to her mother's designs, and she always would.

She murmured to herself:

_**Bharadaz was weak, Bharadaz was a fool!** _

Standing within her kingdom that was beginning to be built, the Eldar growing and multiplying within its environs (already from five thousand they had begun to grow, and to secretly come in the dead of night to Quendi villages and to take unknown captives who awaited a dreadful fate to further replenish their ranks, they had been five thousand a century ago. Now they were fifty thousand, in that prolific and dangerous kind of breeding. Somehow, their Star-Blooding meant that effects of inbreeding did not quite take the same shape. It did not produce the deformed or the feeble-minded, it produced feral savages suited for shock troops and that as yet was unlikely as it took many generations in the old days).

Fifty thousand Eldar, five times the force that had gone north under Neherzingetorix.

She had made the decision long ago, that day when she had slipped away from Melian and her brother. She had made that decision, and she regretted nothing.

The path would be long and winding, and she was yielding to the kind of spiteful acts of petty wanton destruction and cruelty that were her mother's forte. Not hers. Bharadaz the Star-Kindler had been powerful, been destructive, but she was a sledgehammer who treated every problem as if it were a nail.

On the throne she gazed beneath the clouds and the molten heat of her new Crown of Muspel, the mountains that would become as infamous in themselves as the old realm.

She gazed, and that smile that came to her lips now was her own, the savage grin that had been hers whenever she was away from the Star-Kindler.

She was practicing Morgul, sorcery, and.....

She stood up, Nightfall sheathed.

Her mother always limited herself to star-focused power, and she had never learned under Melkor arts that could even partially affect the gifts of others, but that did not matter.

Blue fires blazed on and around her gauntlets, and she raised her fists, and laughed in triumphant shouts as balls of bluish flame sundered, even briefly, the cloud-cover and let in the heat of the daystar, which whatever else it was, was still a star and akin to the power that animated her.

She grinned.

Her power in sorcery had grown after a century. It would be interesting to see how her arts and her growing proficiency in them would hold when and as things changed.

OST IN EDHIL:

She arrived there two days later and spoke to Galadriel and Celeborn in private and knelt and wept, claiming in her sorrow that she had had a fit of the old days and had done great evil, casting hatred toward her mother (no great feat, this, for little love had she had, only fear and knowledge that as terrible as she was there were others far worse than she) and noting that she asked not forgiveness, but only tolerance, and would avoid any parties of Elves in the woods.

The ignorance, feigned, of her granddaughter was not convincing, but Galadriel in particular knew what the monster before her was capable of, and that giving her an excuse here, in this place, and in this element would not work so well. This thing had not quite brought herself to murder the child but she had seen the bones burned black, felt the traces of their death, felt the traces of the sword still strapped to her. There was a dragon in her throneroom, not the splendid dragons of the Great King like Anacalagon the Black, who with Thorondor the King of Eagles was a symbol of hope, but a thing of dread terror, a thing of terrible fires that burned maidens and children.

And it was never more dangerous than when it was that mocking fairness in a kindred to her own mentor, with eyes of brightness that cast a glow that everything Quendi in her stared at and wanted to yield, to let herself into that glow, to let it have power over her and with her and for her.

It echoed with terrible power and there was star-song of a sort in her own palace, its caresses different. The Fallen's song was always monstrous and forthright in its monstrosity, glorying in what it was and how it was that way. This was low and powerful, and beautiful, and it was tempting, so very dreadfully tempting.

Soft words were spoken and then the thing seemed to shimmer away and that terrible song was gone, and then she saw her, Arwen.

She'd crept in, somehow, and had heard the song, and her gaze was so achingly like that of Luthien, but there was something strange here. In the wake of the vanishing of the horribly beautiful presence of the monster, a being that had not thrummed with power as at the conclave but had echoed with a power that flowed into shadows and banished them with a light that burned and burned and bu-

Light blazed around Arwen as a pillar and she walked in the throneroom in a trance and sang a very old song.

Galadriel cried for a moment at recognizing one of her own brother's songs and the power and the spell of the monster was banished and she and Celeborn awoke as from a dream with tears on their face and the taste of salt in their lips, and Arwen seated between them and singing an innocent children's melody. The Peredhils were not like others, and there was nothing necessarily unusual about blends of Elven, at least, blood in humanity if not in other cases. In the Peredhils it was blood of the Ainur, and in Luthien it had burned brightly and so had it in Melian. And so did it in Elrond.

For a moment Galadriel saw a mark on the upper portion of Arwen's collarbone, a mark that she knew from the Tale. And a sense of chill grew the greater then, and the wish she'd spoken came back to her and more strongly.

A terrible set of strands of fate was woven about her family, and at last, some of the elements of Melian's teachings were made visible, and Galadriel indulged herself in the kind of carnivorous smile the old Artanis would have wielded gladly. A chance to avenge the suffering of her own family, at one part. But...more than that, to end the suffering of Arda itself.

She could not _wait_ until Celebrimbor made the Great Rings. Let the serpent choke on its own intrigues.


	11. Fires of the Gods:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the centuries pass, Eregion becomes the great power of western Arda, Numenor undergoes the change of thrones from the death of Kemenros Tar-Minyatur, and Sinmara of Muspeldor continues to study and hone her mystic might in between visits to Celebrimbor. In the year S.A. 600, the great-grandson of Kemenros of Westernesse makes landfall at Hithlum, where the Elves of Lindon, and all Arda, first encounter the rising power of Westernesse.

S.A. 442, RIVENDELL: 

Kemenrond froze, his hand on the doorframe. He heard a voice that he had not heard in a long time, given that his brother had become King of Kings, and that there was so much to do with delving the land of Westernesse and making of it a great realm.

_I am sorry, brother._

For a moment he saw a face the perfect mirror image of his own save that where Kemenrond was clean-shaven, Kemenros had a thick beard that went halfway down his chest, with a clean-shaven upper lip.

_I took the gift of Men, and I have become so engrossed in the power of kingship that I have failed to be as a brother should. You would be proud of our family, brother. Our house, and our relatives, they all have shares of the gifts of Melian. We cannot do with them what you Quendi can, but what we can do....._

Kemenros sighed contentedly.

_Only now, at the end, does it occur to me to remember to be the brother I could have been and should have been. Of the two of us, you have always been the kinder soul and the better father. Farewell, brother, until beyond the end of all things, when Arda is remade unmarred._

Kemenrond closed his eyes, tears flowing freely, as he felt the snapping of that link that was always there, even if his brother had seldom made use of it. His children, his two sons and his daughter, knew that feeling too and gasped in shock and pain, unused to a sensation that would remain in a sense a novelty. Celebrian, who was reading a history from the Blessed Realm saved, as a valuable treasure of treasures, from the ruins of old Doriath, placed it down and went to her husband and held him silently as he wept in great wrenching sobs.

With the passing of Kemenros Tar-Minyatur, the history of Westernesse would reach a great turning point. The son of Kemenros, Kemenamir, declined to wield the Sceptre and to take the Golden Lion Throne, a thing carved with superlative skill by the first masters of the Guild of Metallurgy. The throne was a priceless work of art in its own right, though seldom, until the era of Ar-Pharazon the Golden, acknowledged as a thing in its own right. The symbol of power, the Sceptre, would remain such even into the age of civil war that would come at the decline and fall of Westernesse, and the singular king to broach that tradition (and to leave his Sceptre, thus, to be pilfered by the last two leaders of the Faithful) who would broach this would be the last King of Westernesse and the architect of its destruction.

His own son, Tar-Amandil, became the new King of Westernesse, and would rule for just over a century as the King began to commission fleets, wondering if the pressures at his mind, and those of the lineage of Kemenros and the nobility of Westernesse, reflected some great tumult in the unknown lands to the East. It had been centuries since last they had beheld other Men, and they knew little of the events of the Great Lands and began, in the event, to regret the absence of that knowledge.

S.A. 580, MUSPELDOR:

The tower was rising, slowly and efficiently, though not yet telegraphing the fullness of its purpose. That, in any event, could be managed as a means to keep the growing populations of the Eldar busy, and to ensure that their tasks were honed by military-style purposes even if not yet released to wage war unhindered.

Sinmara, as she had begun to dub herself, the Pale Nightmare, had begun to decipher elements of the changes her mother had wrought upon her that day in Eldaband of old. She had become mighty, given new power and new understanding of power, in the nature of the mysteries of the Song and the Song's great melody and majesty. Hers had been a writ as she who was meant to be one of the two chiefs among the Maiar, powerful enough to match the lesser of the Valar at the dawn, before the rest. Power beyond imagining, and beyond the ken of mortals. Hers had been the will and the mind that had grasped the mechanics of starlight, of the kind of power inherent to the nature of the flames that burned ever amidst the endless chill of the infinite reaches ringing Arda proper.

And hers had been the lot to suffer in those days, for seldom did the Fallen allow for one who could be in truth both equal and rival. She had suffered heavily, sufficiently that she was as harsh a critic of her unlamented mistress as any craven servant of Melkor in the Great Kingdom of the Deathless Lands. She remained all the same caught still further in a net when that hound had set his teeth on her throat, when the Eldar had left her to bleed her way to Mandos. And yet where were the Valar now? She survived, she had sent not one but several proofs of that survival. Bursts of heat, provocations, things meant to test the will of the Lords of the West. The burning of the Quendi family, the attack on the Elf-child who'd dared to stand up to her first experiments in dream-magic.

And now? Now she had become as one of the greater Valar, for beyond the creation of the five Star-Dragons, her mistress had hoarded her power beyond that small outburst sent into star-blooding. Equal to the power of Aule or Yavanna Kementari, though nowhere near Melkor the Great King. If that one ever left his throne she would be a smear on soil and well she knew. It meant nothing. Only the very direst of extremes had led to the Great King personally taking command of the great armies in the God-War.

Near the vast and towering expanse of Mount Doom she kept Nightfall in its scabbard, and raised hands that sparked with flames, relishing the result as her power surged out. No longer was her preferred form that of the truth, a being of the elemental soul-hunger and howling thirst known as starlight, but that of a great figure of molten magma, of such heat that her armor, once golden and blue, had begun to turn black from the sheer extreme of her own power. That had shaken her the first time she had seen it in a mirror, but she had come to relish this.

Fire erupted in streams and fireballs, and in constructs of flame, this last a task she deemed impractical for the quick decision of the battlefield (where in any even her sword would settle damned near anything when it came to it). Nightfall's power had no need of enhancement, and she had studied in memory (the empathic resonance of which added to the Lands of Ash around Mount Doom and her tower where nothing could or would grow) the means of her mother's weakness, and her decline. Too much power had been spent on things beyond her. All that she had done had been to develop the power of Star-Blooding, which was a necessary outlet for her power. Too much weakness would mean that she would revert to the thing of starlight she was at heart, and where she walked, Death would walk, too, to a point that even her own soldiers would die as much as those of her foes.

With Nightfall, and that immense boost in her strength, she was capable individually of laying low great forces but she was not invincible, and too close to success could see the Lords of the West come again in force. It presented her with a conundrum, and that conundrum had seen its first stages with the Rings. Draw the Quendi into rebellion and blasphemy, estrange them from the Lords of the West anew after the rebellion of Feanor. And if it were possible, if this concept in her dreams were possible.....

She knew that it was theoretically possible to make a Ring that could contain and limit the force that had been shoved into her. She was as powerful as a lesser Vala, she did not need to risk too much and if she could spite her own mother in her self-gnawing hatred beyond the Doors, so much the greater. And yet.....

More fire blazed out, burning the land black with its heat, and some of it burning brilliantly enough that it created effects akin to the output of volcanism. There was power here, but it could become a trap. She would not, she vowed, seek to become a mere sorcerer and spend herself to nothingness. Temptation was there all the same, that power that had waited so long for its master or mistress to take it refusing to remain a nothingness in the Void and the thought of Illuvatar. So that too was a reason for the concept of that Ring, a thing that could exorcise the weaknesses of her mother's madness and the new force that added its own chorus to the other, and grant her strength with precision, not merely destruction.

Some among her forces, her Eldar, had come to name her the Dark Lady as her armor turned to a hue to match her throne. She had learned of this, had the Eldar who had given her the names come to her on the Obsidian Throne. Flames blazed from her hands and she spat on their ashes. From that point none dared use such a name again, and she was spoken of as Sinmara, the Pale Nightmare, or the Raven Queen, for her work and power in training her magic drew ravens and crows hungry for the carrion left behind. And on such star-saturated carrion, growing monstrous and.....changed. 

Centuries had lapsed since the first Eldar had begun to make their habitation in the mountains ringing her growing Kingdom of Muspeldor. They had grown, and grown quickly, for they were a kind engineered to breed at great speed in short duration, with great number.

When their lord Elladan, who would become a figure of fear in this age to rival herself, or the Lords of Starlight, as her Star-Blooded Men and her great servants empowered by both Star-Blooding and the Nine Rings, would become and become as great and terrible figures only lesser than the one whose power had warped and remade them, came to her to ask her permission to go forth on a raid, it was at once granted.

Then news came to her from another of her ravens.

A Ring, though only one of those that would come to be seen as the Lesser Rings, was at last in the position to be forged. Confirming her orders to Elladan, she departed with a thought.

S.A. 580, FORGES OF CELEBRIMBOR:

In retrospect, Celebrimbor would recognize the swift appearance of Aurelian right when he was poised to make the first of his trifles as a sign of who she truly was, and that her willingness to hide and to pretend to be an emissary of the Lords of the West was waning. At the time he heralded with gladness the arrival of his good friend and confidant who had spent times from weeks to even years in the forges with him, pondering the means of summoning and binding that power within the Rings that tapped even slightly into elements of the Dawn-Chorus that heralded all Existence.

She strode into the forge boldly in a form of great beauty with a low droning sound accompanying her, and the sword Nightfall remaining in its scabbard.

With him she watched and listened as the small element of the Music echoed, the hammer in the forge accompanying it with a sound as of the footsteps of Mandos welcoming all within his Hall, or those of the barefoot and barely sane raving Elentari in her path beyond the Doors of Night. The light of the forge and the impact of the hammer on the molten metal reflected in her eyes and those more wise than Celebrimbor felt unease as the droning became more than a thing of whispers and mutters at the edge of creation and something that sounded with greater force, elements of the forge starting to rattle with the impact.

In the fall of the hammer, and the cooling of the Ring, the first of the trifles, of which there would be several dozen, was forged successfully. To the Great and the Mighty it truly was just this, a trifle, a thing of amusement. To mortals it granted power that was not meant to be possessed by mortals, sight within the invisible sphere, and an eye for deception that meant that its path would become littered with blood into the age of the War of Ruin.

S.A. 580, ELVEN SETTLEMENTS NEAR THE FORDS OF ISEN:

Another strange cloudless night came in what would become a trend in the growing terrors of the Lost Centuries. The Elves of this community were not the Noldor-Sindar mixture of Eregion, who even then were poised to make the very first of the Lesser Rings, but a community of Sindar, distant relatives of those who would become the lords of the Greenwood.

The cloudless night shone and sang and murmured with desires for blood and horror, the Elves sound asleep in their bed, where dreams were as much truth to them as that which was and is in the realm of Waking. When the horns sounded for the first time since the Dawn-Age, with their brass rumble of menace and fear, the sound intruded on dreams that changed from pleasure to those of red slaughter. Twice more did the horns sound, and then the chanting began that awoke the Elves, who awoke too late to halt that which began, and which would draw more Quendi into the maw of the rising power of Muspeldor, rewriting souls and beginning the process of replenishing the ranks of the Eldar with new Star-Blooded.

_Elbereth Elbereth Elbereth!_

_Elbereth Elbereth Elbereth!_

And then, a new chant, the first of those to be heard and to endure through the ages to come:

_Muspelli Muspelli Muspelli!_

_Muspelli Muspelli Muspell!_

By the time the Quendi were able to reach their weapons the Eldar burst in doors and surged in with their weapons roaring in the sheer delight of the great slaughter. Within two hours the last attempt to settle the land near the Fords of Isen in this Age died, never to be repeated until after the War of the Last Alliance, when it would not be Elves nor quite Dunlending, but distant cousins of the House of Hador. Men would inherit the works of their own cousin and of Elves with a distinct lack of curiosity or concern.

The nature of the massacre was visible, and so were the unmistakeable traces of heavily armored boots. From this point forward, that which has been held to be a distant memory began to become anew a cruel reality.

By now, with the second and the third of the trifles things that had become tangible, accomplished fact....Gil-Galad Ereinion had welcomed the making of the Rings, for there was no backward step now. Only forward, and deeper into realms that had no good prospects save that the Elves would be able to make greater and more splendid things to restrain the growing tide of menace. The first trifle had come to him personally, delivered by Celebrimbor himself, and he still looked at it from time to time, until ultimately the decision would be made to leave it within his vaults, unconcerned of its fate (and by a perverse circumstance, it would be one of the few things not burned to molten morass by the weight of the Burning of Hithlum).

News of Eldar raids, which were to become a regular and initially small but growing in scale and severity with the strengthening of the hellish light of Muspeldor and its still initially unknown force that had arisen out of the grave to command it, further confirmed this. It was a necessity, lest another wave of terror like the Burning consumed work long in the sowing and yet swift in the withering heat to perish into unmarked and blackened ashes as if it had never been.

S.A. 600:

Twenty years later, as the Eldar raids continued their slow drum-beat that helped to lull the Quendi into unwarranted overconfidence of their military ardor relative to the force that opposed them, news came of a great fleet that was making its way to the coast. It was a fleet of hitherto unknown design, ships of metal with strange tubes, and flying a dark banner with a silver tree and sigils of Melkor at the apex, and three of the Valar and three of the Valier around the tree. None knew it at the time but these were but the first of the fleets of Westernesse, fleets that reached a height and prowess matched only in the Undying Lands themselves, where such prowess had faded into memory and the blessed light of Aman, rather than retaining active power to wage war.

As ships these were small and petty things by the standard of the seaborne leviathans of Ar-Pharazon's time, and the iron-work was primitive. Barely seagoing, by the standards of later Westernessean fleets, the least impressive of the things looked like nothing so much as a cheesebox on a raft. Yet to the inhabitants of the Great Lands such a sight had never before been seen or imagined. Neither, too, were the tall and strange Men that appeared. Tall were the Numenoreans of old, where those who were considered short were six and a half feet and those considered tall were at a height that reflected the blessing of Illuvatar more than anything a human body could naturally support. They had grown great under their first Kings, akin to the Quendi in knowledge and wisdom, and from the light of the Land of the Five Corners in them the presence was great an impact as the coming of the Feanorians, whose presence had been heralded by the blowing of trumpets and the first moon-rise.

Ereinion Gil-Galad stood in full armor, his sword at his side, uncertain as to the nature of this visit, at first, but when the figure that set out from one of the ships strode onto the beaches near Hithlum's outer edges, he blinked. So like his great grandfather was Tar-Kemendil that for a moment Gil-Galad stared in incomprehension/ "Kemenros?"

The armored and towering King who dwarfed him in height and bulk shook his head and laughed gently.

"You honor me by comparing me to the worthy one who founded our lineage. I am King Tar-Kemendil of Westernesse. The land you call Andor."

Gil-Galad's eyes were wide, and then he shook hands as one would with an equal, and Tar-Kemendil and his men, who came donned in light tunics, save the King, who sought to make an impression by appearing in armor more ceremonial than practical, strode merrily into Hithlum, gazing in awe at the Elven city and the beauty of its works.

Great were the power of Lindon and Eregion in their height, and only Westernesse could be a true equal to them then, for the rumor of Muspeldor was hidden beneath clouds and the dismal fate of those who sought to settle too close to the south. In their prosperity, the Elven and mortal lands and the Dwarves likewise felt no reason to venture into peril that would require the donning of armor and sword and the expense of war when peace would do. Only those who remembered the ravages of the Skulltaker and faced the smaller and more terrible perils of the growing Eldar-raids spoke otherwise, but their voices were dismissed as alarmism.

And yet.......

When Tar-Kemendil came into the throneroom of Gil-Galad Ereinion he bowed before the King and his wife, humbled before the gaze of ageless beings whose flesh never knew weariness, he heard the statements of 'a new force out of the Dawn-Time, or perhaps an old one, resurrected.'

In the time since they had come to the Land of the Five Corners, the people of Numenor had made a great effort to forget the dreadful experiences their ancestors had undergone at the hands of the Fallen beyond carefully sanitized legends. so the name mentioned, that of the 'Hell-Queen' who was said to have lived and reappeared from time to time, made little impact then. All that was said, and that lightly, with the calmness that lies only those who had not seen war nor its horrors in a very long time. And yet the stories endured, even in sanitized form as tales of great giants like the night sky made flesh whose presence heralded great burnings of a kind that were unknown, a heat that quite literally obliterated utterly entire portions of reality around it, carrying lands within the ocean.

The promise of aid was given, and in time to come, with the stories that would spread and proliferate and the start of wanderings by Numenoreans from this point forward, and the establishment of colonies that would grow in the far south, Numenor would begin, after the first colony died a year later in a massive well-planned assault by heavily armored and armed Eldar who butchered it slowly and methodically and left the bloodied skulls and spinal columns on spikes around the colony's outer edges, to begin to use the great technological prowess bequeathed it by the Quendi knowledge and that of the Undying Lands.

None knew, after the first of the colonies was massacred by no less than forces under Elladan himself, that with the forging of the first of the Great Rings with Celebrimbor and Aurelian beginning to take a very direct role together in making them, that the fragile peace of Arda had but near three centuries left to run before it would erupt outwardly into a thing of terror and horror that would not truly fade until the Last Alliance and the wake of the Breaking of the World. 


	12. The Mahanaxar and the Blood-Tithe of the East:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Muspeldor begins its first wave of conquests to the East in preparation for the later wars to come, the Valar reach a decision. Two Istari, the first of what will become five, are to be sent to the distant realms of the Great Lands in the East. As Allatar and Pallando begin their journey, fire blazes in the East and the South as Sinmara of Muspeldor begins to build a great empire.

MAHANXANAR, TANIQUIETL, S.A. 886:

The Lords of the West seldom called Maiar before all of them to the Ring. Still less did they summon two such Maiar who were among the very most powerful of their kind. For their own part, Allatar and Pallando looked at each other with visible unease. Allatar was a great Maia of Aule, and one trained by both Aule and the Great King, and by Mairon, the Songmaster of the Great King. His were deep arts. His had been a sword of light that fought with great skill and furious anger against the weight of the forces of the Fallen in the old days.

Pallando was the second greatest shapechanger among the Maiar after Mairon, a Maia of Manwe Sulimo, and one of the company of his herald, the greatest swordsman in Arda. They were by all means among the most loyal and obedient of the Maiar, so to be summoned so abruptly and with the herald of Melkor the Great King giving them that look on his face meant they were uncertain.

Allatar was clad in a form of his own thought, neither stone nor metal but somewhere in between with eyes that blazed with fire. .

Pallando was a swarthy figure in between that of the Quendi and the Secondborn with long dark hair and bright blue eyes, clad in dark robes.

Both had looked at each other with uncertainty, though it was Allatar who shrugged first.

It was Melkor the Great King who spoke, after a consultation with the Lord of the Seven Winds, who signaled its completion by blinking and nodding.

_**It is beyond all doubt now, Melkor began, that the Utumnonatari has arisen again and is building some new force of devilry to release upon the Free Peoples. She was given the chance to repent, and to come to Valinor to face judgment, and she eschewed both. Yours is not a task to face her force with force, for she was already the mightiest of you before the Fallen.......before she unleashed forces that should never have been unleashed. To fight her with force will see both of you broken and no good come of it. You shall go to the Great Lands, to those realms to their east and to their south.** _

_**You are to hinder her schemes in all ways save a direct trial by force. As the Children of Illuvatar shall ye go, and by means within those limits, ye shall bring to heel the schemes of the Utumnonatari and hinder them, until such time as the Doom that encircles her shall come due at last.** _

It was Pallando who blinked, then.

"A doom, lord?"

_**Aye, a Doom. Spoken by the will of my brother Namo, through the voice of the Songwright-in-exile.** _

Mandos then spoke himself.

**Not to you nor to any of the people of Valinor is it given to be the cause of her downfall. The last of the lineage of the Peredhil to bear the undiminished face of Luthien, and the last of the lines of the Kings of the North shall bring forth in fullness that which was said in falseness as a deed of Beren and Luthien.**

Pallando blinked.

"You mean that where we cannot match her by force, two beings who however mighty they are, are but mortal will?"

Mandos stared levelly.

**They shall bring forth her downfall. How this works, precisely, we do not yet know. But bring it forth they shall.**

With that the two who would become the first of the Istari nodded and bowed, as Melkor and Manwe descended from their thrones and laid hands upon them, beginning an incantation of great power and strength that would give them their new shapes.

The hulking stone-and-metal form of Allatar became that of a great and bulky and towering man. In physique, though as with their counterparts of the Third Age, they seemed in part elderly Men, Allatar would be the most massively and stoutly built of the Istari. Like an Ent wrought as a man, clad in robes of blue with a blue staff adorned with a gem of the make of his master.

Pallando by contrast became a Man in shape, with skin as brown as the Earth, and eyes of piercing blueness with a gaze that was hypnotic even against the full weight of starlight. His robes were blue, though he would take to the wearing of a specialized suit of armor meant to call to mind the spirit of the old Galvorn of the Avari, reasoning that the blend of old memories and legends with other realities could work to their advantage. In later years this origin would be forgotten, and by the time of his fabled clash with Conan of Cimmeria in the Land of Zamora, it would become something else again.

Where the voice of Allatar despite his hulking appearance was surprisingly light and smooth and one to instill hope, the voice of Pallando was deep, deeper than most, and one heard as clearly in a whisper in the midst of a howling baying crowd as many voices that shouted.

By a strange quirk of fate, it was Ainwendil, Curumo, and Olorin who saw them off, and words were exchanged in hesitation and confidence. Then they stepped onto a ship crewed by an Elf who was starting to grow stubble (and there Pallando cocked his head with curiosity but ultimately shrugged) and sailed to the East.

THE FORGES OF CELEBRIMBOR, S.A. 886:

When Celebrimbor forged the first of the Great Rings, that which would become one of the rings given to the Nine Star-Lords, Aurelian had been there with him, and the self-proclaimed Bearer of the Word had celebrated with him proof of the concept and of its nature. It would take him a century more to finish them all, with the last the three Great Rings, but now....now Aurelian not only knew that it could work, but would go to the South to begin work on her own Great Ring, one that would be finished within a year of the completion of the last of the Great Rings.

At least officially, those were the reasons of the Bearer of the Word's own statements. in truth she was content and more than content that her concept was not only workable but displayed the promise it was given. In practice she also knew, by now, after Eldar had roved far abroad to the South and to the East that in the wake of Neherzingetorix's rise and the fate of the Haradrim at the hands of the Elves and Dwarves that no such leader had arisen since nor was it likely any would in time to come. Vast and teeming legions, enough that even the Valusian Kingdom of the children of Yig to the south could be contained, if so she wished. Legions to augment and to boost her own Eldar, legions that no conventional strategy and even the potential risk of the Numenoreans, who were not, in the wake of the massacre in the region of the river Isen, could be counterbalanced by forces sustained by her own terror and able to augment those numbers.

After all, the King-men of the West, who were seen and revered as Gods by the Middle-Men, at no point made any efforts to provide manufacturing for their weapons stockpiles. If they did have that ability, as opposed to relying on discarded Elf weaponry, they were displaying an amazing amount of hubris in failing to provide further focus. Too, in the lapse from the Elder Age, the ferocity and willingness to die in carload lots that the armies of the Fallen had in that time had been forgotten in some cases and willfully misremembered as a legacy of bad times in another.

Her Tower of Fire was rising, the term 'Tower' too simplistic to describe something that was meant to be a fortification that even absent her direct presence no conventional force could assail. She had been tempted with her new power and her....enhancements....and with the strange energy that had surged into her when it had found at last a force willing to entertain it and its prowess, to make the building reliant on her own person for extra security. And yet....something so risky as that would leave the prospect of another figure like Huan sent from the West, and then what? Rebuilding the entire Tower over centuries as its rise unfolded?

No.

Her mother had tried too much, she had done too much with that focus on destroying Arda and spent too much of herself in the effort to do so. She had not seen her as a raving feral lunatic but she had seen, she had felt, the expansion of that weakness. That would not be her.

It was in that sense that with her fortification nearly complete, that she strode south with an army of Eldar that had grown and swelled, a force that would have horrified the growing Elven realms to the north and those of Men still moreso. Commoria had been devastated by the aftermath of the Skulltaker and his Drive to the North. Grondar, the great kingdom and somewhat of a geographical expression that sprawled across the far east was to meet the full force of Nightfall when she wished.

First she would march east, to the Kingdom of Kamelia, a realm of mixed human and Valusian settlement. The Children of Yig were like any other such entities, they had strife and dissension and disagreement on how to deal with other forms of life. Those who had moved to become part of the Kingdom of Kamelia were among the very most warlike and aggressive of the breed. They had begun raids on Commoria in the wake of the time of the Skulltaker, and there were long and fierce and pitiless wars fought.

Kamelia's lands butted well into what would become the eastern frontiers of Muspeldor as the realm would evolve in the Second Age and again in the Third, and thus it was to become the first of her targets. Commoria was loyal to her mother, so it would rally to her. Even if it wasn't, the raids of the Valusian-human armies of Kamelia would have done the job for her. Her soldiers did not fear the sun, but the Eldar did need to sleep, and so she marched them by night and allowed them to rest by day. The realms to the east fascinated her, there were rich lands here, crop-fields sufficient to sustain armies of several million strong.

There was so much to discover and to grasp about the nature of her realm as it grew and expanded outward.

She had come to the frontier of what had been the Kingdom of Kamelia as it was in a brief period of centuries from the time of the Skulltaker to the first of the great Eastern wars. This time her army slept by night, and then roused itself to approach the first of the border castles of what Kamelia termed its Western Lines. The aura of malice and fear that went before Sinmara of Muspeldor had brought troubled dreams that night, dreams amplified by small conjurations of her magics that brought hot winds at night that pierced through buildings and brought misery and madness in their wake.

When the horns of the Eldar sounded in the small hours of the morning and the reddish light of Dawn cast its blood-hue over the army, the Eldar began their chants. They had chanted her mother's name alone, once. That was changing, as all things did.

_Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë. Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë._

_Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë. Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë._

Her true-name, a word of Valarin origin that rippled out with a second fanfare of the terrible horns, and with frantic shouts from the soldiers of the garrison. The one who wielded it may be dead, but it was a name that would instill fear, especially when the time came right, when the Ring was made, and when she would march north to the forges of Celebrimbor to gain her new gifts to bestow as the new Queen of the Great Lands.

She drew Nightfall from its scabbard and as the dawn's reddish hue and heat surged outward upon the day Nightfall's flames made it seem as though high noon had come in the small hours of the morning. 

She raised the blade upward, the light casting eerie shadows in the town beyond the castle, where roofs were already burning and fields dissolving into ashes and fires, and then swept it in a loose display of contempt that was no stroke a swordsman would recognize. It hurled a stream of flames from the blade that slammed into the castle's brick, rendering it brittle and weak.

Sinmara's voice boomed in a sound of triumphant malice.

_**You trespass on the lands of Sinmara, daughter of the Star-Kindler. For this you and your stunted realm shall burn.** _

Those who would seek salvation must offer me the dripping hearts of their firstborn, and then they shall welcome their new Master and be remade in my image.

As the Eldar thronged outward, howls of pain and agony began as the desperate took knives and fell upon their own children. It was less than half who did, the rest surged from their homes donning armor and swords and shouting in wrath. The Eldar moved forward to face them and where others went straight for Sinmara, she inclined her head to give them an indulgent kind of smile before flicking her wrist as her blade hewed flesh from flesh and left blackened ruins of limbs and faces. In the first assault on a forgotten fortress whose ruins would awe Aragorn son of Arathorn in his first journey to the East, the destiny of Kamelia was set.

From this point each fortification and each city was given the ultimatum. Loyalty sealed in the dripping hearts of the firstborn children, offerings by fire hallowed by Nightfall.

To some of the children of the East and the south, she would become known as Mole-chah, a name that in later years would become preserved as Moloch the Devourer, whose face and gender would change to that of a Kingly figure rather than the Queen with the sword of flame who initiated the dread tradition.

The offering of the hearts of the Firstborn, the Blood-Oath (to some of the peoples of Kamelia) and the Blood-Tithe (to others) was refused by the children of Yig.

Yet others came to her and offered the skulls of their fathers, of elder beings of their race, and the light of Sinmara's eyes burned with a terrible splendor as she welcomed to her ranks the first of the Valusians who would become among her most deadly and long-lived servants.

For seven years Kamelia burned, and in the last three Commoria roused itself from slumber and its riders harried its eastern frontiers, regaining lost lands and resealing in blood their alliance with the servants of the Star-Kindler, the Greatest Among the Gods.

For a time the hunger of the new Kingdom of Muspeldor, formally proclaimed in the Oath of the Tower where the King and the Lords of Commoria and the Humans and Valusians of Kamelia who had paid the Blood-Tithe knelt before the Tower with the great lords of the Ljossalfar, with the Jotnar by their side, and swore the oath of ninety-nine words that sealed their pacts and their fates through two Ages to come, was sated. It took thirty years to absorb and consolidate the alliance with Commoria and to add the full weight of Kamelia that became the eastern lands of Muspeldor, to decide how such lands were to be administered.

S.A. 887, GREY HAVENS: 

"Thank you for conveying us here, Lord Cirdan." It was Allatar who bowed first, his great bulk giving it more prominence than the smaller but no less sincere bow of the rich brown-hued Pallando.

The Quendi bowed in turn.

Allatar and Pallando would journey south to Hithlum, where they would speak first to High King Gil-Galad Ereinion and his queen, and then would venture to Ost-in-Edhil, where they would speak to Galadriel, Celeborn, and Celebrimbor. The news of the Great Rings deeply displeased them, and they were the more deeply troubled by Aurellian the so-called Bearer of the Word. Knowing that their orders forbade a direct confrontation, the reality sank into them at last what it would mean to be Wizards, to have tremendous power and skill to lead the children of the Great Lands to their own devices of resistance, and yet.....

From there the two Blue Wizards would ride to the East, on a horse from the stables of Ost-in-Edhil, and there they and their deeds passed out of the knowledge of the West, until one of the last ships to go to the Undying Lands held one Istar in blue, a great and towering figure, with the last members of a fellowship who had sought to bring forth a great task and seen it done. Only in the later ages, the Fifth and Sixth, the Hyborean Age, would the fate of Pallando become clear when Thoth-Amon of Stygia, master of resurrection and of shapeshifting, an immortal sorcerer of great and terrible power, rose as a distant ghost of the Star-Kindler and the Utumnonatari. 

S.A. : 916:

Then, for a year, there came notice that the Queen of Muspeldor was seeking a Great Muster that would rally the new unified peoples to drive further to the east, against Zarfanna, a sprawling agrarian realm ruled by the Lords of Zarfan, who knew no King,

The horrors of the Blood-Tithe were known, and the fearsome power of Nightfall was known as well.

Vowing that the hunger of the Devourer-Demon in the Tower of Fire would not be gratified, a great host of Zarfan's finest soldiers moved in mail, including the first of the Cataphractii who would become so fearsome in the later War of Muspeldor and the Elven Kingdoms. They were five thousands, clad in shining mail and with great hammers and swords. Against them were a hundred thousand of the combined armies of Muspeldor, great teeming hordes of Eldar that hammered swords against shields and bayed

_Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë!_

_Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë Ilmarë!_

For the first time since the Dawn-Time, a solid force of Jotnar, who held great catapults wielded by the Ljossalfar, whose shining eyes and pale skin and frenzied motions were things of dread and fear to the children of the East marched with them, and so did a mixed force of Commorians, of Valusians clad in bright green plate armor that was not invincible in truth (for the swords and spells of the West could, with great cost, shatter them but woe to those who dealt the blow, and it was those who came after who survived to make them count) but relative to the arts of the people of Zarfanna might as well have been. And beyond them, the soul-shattered and dead-eyed hosts of what had been Kamelia, who raised a great and bloodthirsty ululation that brought fear to the hearts of those who heard it. 

Sinmara strode before her armies as a giant of magma veined in fire.

**_Children of Zarfanna, your fate is thus! Die at my blade and those of my armies sworn to the Oath of the Tower, or offer me the dripping hearts of your firstborn children, extending the Oath to your realm. Those who offer me the hearts of their firstborn to be hallowed in Nightfall's fire shall endure and they and their families shall receive great rewards. Those who do not shall account themselves honored to perish at the blade Nightfall, for the children of Midgard, of the Ljossalfar, and of the Jotnar in my ranks shall not be so kind as I shall be!_ **

**_Your flesh rent and burnt or the hearts of your firstborn children! Decide now, sons of Zarfanna! Shall ye live or shall ye die? Your skull or the heart of your children!_ **

As one the bulk of the armies of Zarfanna, both those who fought on foot clad in mail and those cataphractii clad with equally armored horses bellowed in wrath and defiance in some mongrel Mannish tongue that Sinmara had never bothered to learn.

_**So be it.** _

She raised her blade and its light shone with the brightness of the noon-day Sun and those of Zarfanna closest to it who stared at her and at the blade were blinded by its light.

_**In the shape of fire I did bind demons and death-doers into the form of monsters!** _

Nightfall descended and slammed into the ground which pulsed and convulsed as if it were stabbed itself and heat blazed out with volcanic fury beneath the armies of Zarfanna.

_**So perish all who stand against me.** _

Her armies' horns rang and in a roaring tide of swarming poorly-structured legions amplified and enhanced by the power of her Star-Flame spurring them on and an incantation that meant what burned and horrified the armies of Zarfanna amplified the ferocity of her armies. She swept along at the van, her sword moving in great strokes that burned and severed the bodies of her victims, laughing and glorying in her triumphs.

The Gift of Men might make these mortals free with will in a way that she was not, even with all her mother's follies augmenting her, but they were fragile, children of weakness. There was something viscerally delightful in how her blade hewed what it struck, leaving no spurts of blood, merely flesh and bone shattered and burnt, and the visible marks of the blade that if it remained closer left charred lumps of interwoven flesh and metal. She was a bow-shock and no force of human writ could hold her, and behind her her armies swarmed and buried what sought to move around her, save the very bravest and the most foolish of the armies of Zarfanna.

In the Battle of the Field of Carnage, the flower of the independent Kingdom of Zarfanna perished without a trace or any save the long laments of the Easterlings that preserved their name, perished before fire and fury and the elemental madness of the Star-Kindler's hordes of monstrous things in the form of soldiers that were like forces of nature that walked and spoke.

When the army marched to the gates of the first cities, Nightfall flashed with its noontide light and the shadows vanished beneath the harshness of its gaze and the ferocity of its heat. Fewer of the people of Zarfanna resisted the demand for the Blood-Tithe than was so in Kamelia, for when their King had fallen and with him the best and the brightest of their soldiers, desperation and despair reaped their harvest as the light in the eyes of Sinmara blazed.

S.A. 917:

It was a year after this that the two Blue Wizards arrived, in a cold and desolate winter around which the unhallowed ground where the offerings to Mole-cha the Devourer had been made showed no signs of winter cold, only a barren desolation that marked the sorrows inflicted. Allatar was silent, if fearsome-seeming, but Pallando sang, and sang a song of old Valinor, of the names and the nature of the Valar, and where he sang and invoked the names of the Lords of the West, the desolate howl of the winds of Muspeldor became a gentler caress.

In the deep sorrow and shame of the Blood-Tithe and the horrors of Nightfall, and the shame of the pact, hope seemed lost and the Valar of the Far North a forgotten memory.

In the coldest period of the winter, which in the Far East meant that the ground was covered in snow and frost and the winds would have killed lesser beings entirely, a song of old Valinor brought forth hope, and that which had dulled and become as ashes began, at first and very cautiously, to burn with a small ember of brilliant redness in the otherwise-total gloom of the starlight.

Clouds rose where they walked, clouds in the shape of great Eagles and Dragons, and the star-chorus became muffled.

That night a troop of Eldar sought to attack the two Istari, uncertain as to what these two unknown forces were and how they worked.

In brilliant flashes of strange energies, the taller and bigger one raised his staff and spoke words of a forgotten tongue in the Far West. The smaller and darker one pulled out a sword he'd taken from the Blessed Land with him, from the halls and armory of the herald of the Lord of the Seven Winds. It shone brighter than the stars and between them twenty-five Eldar were dispatched with broken bodies and they passed on, given a brief place to stay from a family that had eschewed the Blood Tithe and lingered in pain and burns and slow suffering. All the men in that family were dead, burned by the sword Nightfall in the battle against the demon-queen of Muspeldor.

In a house of sorrows and suffering, the first stages in the long line and network of the societies who sought to resist the dread Tyrant took their first tentative steps to formation, and long histories of valor and strength began that were unknown and unsung west of Muspeldor's volcanic shield.


	13. Nightmares and Dreamscapes:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ilmare falls asleep from the exhaustion of her plans and unanticipated issues with staying in one body too long. In the dream she encounters an old and unwanted familiar face.

MUSPELDOR, THRONEROOM OF THE OBSIDIAN TOWER:

Her labors had been long. Kingdoms overthrown and the power of the dread sword Nightfall cowing those who would not submit otherwise. Vast expanses of Rhun and Harad now knew but one ruler, herself. Sinmara, Queen of the Kingdom of the World-Destroyers. A forbidding name and she most worthy of those who wielded it. The Star-Blooded were multiplying again and had done so for centuries and absent greater wars had become mighty hosts. They were subtly different than their precursors of the old days. Still hulking in form but brutish, upper bodies oversized relative to the lower. Only Valusia and its capital Irem and cities of distant Araby and of the Land Between the Rivers resisted her in the south, Far Harad a place of which she knew little and cared less.

To the east she had marched through the forbidding vast mountains that she had thought were the World's Edge, into an infinite land-sea that matched the other land-sea. Ferocious nomads had sought to resist her and with a stroke of inspiration Nightfall had set parts of the Steppe afire and its nomads now joined her. Skulking fearful Avari taken and Star-Blooded into new captains as of the First Age. And the Rings, the Rings! Great Rings were now fact, not merely theory, and she was continuing her work on one of the most fearsome concepts of them all. A Ring of Erinti forged from gold that had laid beneath the bones of those burned and blackened by her mother's starlight in the ol-no, by the Star-Kindler's starlight in the old days.

It was night now and the stars hummed and droned with their songs that she could and did hear and she felt weary for reasons she could not explain. It was her habit to shapeshift from time to time to develop her magick further. She could never match Mairon of Valinor for the way her flesh changed but none in the Great Lands could. She did not need to. Just enough to cow the mortals. And there was that other force that had not had its master call upon it and had fastened into her. Power meant, in her surmises from time to time, to be wielded by another and now hers. She had gained strange perceptions and understandings of the other Ainur and of the portions of their being and their presence. That granted some power but it was that of the lumberjack knowing where to lay the axe to the tree, not something she could more directly exploit. And her power over starlight had increased, too. Now she too could conjure the strange and terrible things her mothe-the Star-Kindler-had done in the old days.

The collapsed stars that had devoured everything, things that pulsed with a light and a heat that scoured the world in fire and left those horrid burns and deformities on the body and the soul.

She had made a new variant of her old armor, golden as it had been. It enhanced her strength, and in its plate form she seemed more an elemental work of art given will as a person, her sword in its scabbard by her side. She wore the armor often nowadays, finding in it a reminder of who she had been. Weariness pulled at her and the stars' droning sounds of blood and skulls and ruin wormed their ways into her ears and even she, clad in a form more like that of the night sky that walked, fell into the land of Lorien, for one of the few times one among the Ainur would know actual physical sleep, beyond the Istari.

THE DREAMLANDS:

She found herself on her knees, her sword in its scabbard, in a cold place of mist, frost riming her boots and her greaves. Her breath created steam as did her motions in other ways and in other spheres, and she drew her sword from its scabbard and watched the fires slither up the blade and burn. Steam replaced fog and the frost became a small pool of water. Darkness, darkness all around her and then she heard a laugh, a horribly familiar laugh that warbled with its elements of madness. The sky seemed to move and to become a giant, one become rangy and skeletal, her body partially constricted by a powerful chain that drew from her iridescent blood, her motions jerking. Now swift and now graceful. She was unclad, too, but that hardly mattered amidst warbling laughter interspersed with vicious-sounding snarls more the sounds of a warg than a person of any decency.

 _ **Come, daughter, have you no words for your dear beloved mother?**_ The voice was as she knew it and the night sky that walked turned near her and seemed to drop to her knees, kneeling, and the gigantic nature of that shape was amplified by the eerie howling of the light that had been her body, once.

 _ **You are not my mother. You are the Fallen. You twisted me, poisoned my very soul itself.**_ The mad warbling laughter echoed with its sinister overtones and undertones.

_**So painfully naive, little one. You are of my people and I placed my own soul within yours. By lineage we are of kind, by union of souls, we are kindred in truth. Try to bind that power in a magic Ring all you will, all you will make is a thing for world-destruction, which in the end I suppose is mastery. Who can destroy a thing is its master absolute, not its ruler.** _

The smile was the same, and Sinmara hissed. **_You are beyond the Doors and all sight and sound of mortals._**

That laughter echoed in a terrifying form mirrored by all the stars beyond her and that gleamed from her flesh. 

_**In waking, yes. You are in the realm of Brother Lorien now, subject to your own fears and memories. And in them, girl, I am ruler of all things as I was when you came to me in the dawn-time, before we laid waste to the kingdoms on the worlds around this one and became bogged down in the war here.** _

Sinmara closed her eyes but could not keep them closed.

_**You spurned repentance and trial, girl, that would have saved you. Oh it would have been unpleasant, sure, but spurning it? To Hell you have dragged yourself and in your own fires you shall burn as I did, in the end.** _

Sinmara snarled and raised Nightfall and the blade burned with a brilliant heat.

_**That too is one of my great designs, my greatest weapon of mortal form and my greatest soldier, one and indivisible. Even in your moments of healing you never cast Nightfall aside. You continue to burn and to lay waste to entire civilizations. The great wain-riders have knelt before you and seen in you agents of their conquest. We are not beings in a sense of true independence, daughter-mine. There is no thought, nor vision, nor deed of greatness that you have done that has not had its origin in me and in my nature, and in my being, and in my heart!** _

Her right hand clenched into a massive fist that yet seemed to burn in unhallowed fashions, the light blazing with a heat that scourged even her.

_**All that is or will ever be in terms of the other ways, in defiance of the Allfather and of his great dream is mine, in thought, in word, in deed. In what is done and what is left undone, in what is said and what is left unsaid. Mine the will that set the stars to burn, mine the fires that blaze in the darkness and hunger that all should be orderly in a chorus that shall never be deafened.** _

Sinmara growled.

_**I know no gods, and no masters. If I suspect that there is anything to this, I will burn Muspeldor and then I shall march upon the Blessed Lands and lay it low as you did in its Darkening. Beneath the chorus of the stars the Valar shall burn and I shall open the Doors and then this blade shall go in your wretched heart.** _

The night sky laughed and then she stood before her, not the feral snarling thing that had raved at invisible titans that had sometimes been all too visible and spoken of the world beyond the Doors of Night in the Infinite Void, but the suave and confident Star-Kindler as she had been. Hair long and marked with the howling starlight, her body clad androgynously in a vest and in trousers, and nothing else. Varda Elentari as she had been, the one who had dragged Valinor into the Darkening when freed from the Halls of Mandos, who had ultimately taken the field herself and each time shattered the Elven armies beyond repair in her own flames. 

She was twice her height still and her stars burned more brilliantly and their music was terrifyingly potent but for all that there was an eerie kinship in their chosen forms.

Varda, to her, was more terrifying as this than the feral near-simian thing that had been laid low by the Dancer in the end.

Her smile was that roguish one that had prevailed then and it was that one's hand that reached out to cup her chin.

_**This is Lorien's realm, dear daughter. Here, I am as you see me. In the end, you fear not the feral savage that Nessa humiliated, but you do fear this. The gleaming being with eyes that glowed with a light that brought the mightiest of the Elves to ruin at their own hand. It was as this that I contained you and I shaped you, so of course you fear this more.** _

Then with that the entire element of the dream shifted and they were in the old fortress in the days of the War of the Powers, before the battle where she had been wounded and fled.

The armies of the Star-Blooded of those first days howled beneath the fortress, not yet ready to be unleashed. Other monsters moved, some lesser and some greater and all bellowing with the pain that drove them into terrifying frenzies such that the last slain by the Powers was as great a challenge as that of the first. She could feel him. Mairon was coming, and there would be a duel. Her Queen appeared beside her in that sudden motion and in the eerie droning that echoed with snarls and quasi-singing that echoed within the winds.

**_You have done us proud, win or lose. The mightiest sorcerer in all Arda and he cannot guarantee if his prowess with the blade or the spell would overcome you._ **

This was not then, this was still the dream, and the grip on her shoulder was more powerful in the dream than it had been then. There were no half-crazed whispers of what she would do with, and to, the Lord of the Seven Winds when he broke and yielded to her. There was only this. 

Only eyes that glowed with hunger and seemed to viscerally drink in the world around them, hair smattered with the same starlight and a voice that had undertones of snarls but only undertones.

_**The Ring won't help you, dear. It will merely bring sorrow and ruin, but that I do not object to. You cannot remove my power within you, for even without the soul-union we are of the Vardarin, the tribe of the stars. Bone of bone and flesh of flesh. You are soul of soul. Make that Ring as you will, it cannot free you. Nothing can. Even I went beyond the Doors in the end.** _

Anger blazed within her and the blade was in her hand and Nightfall burned with a terrible heat that melted parts of Eldaband around it. 

_**No Gods! No Masters!** _

And then the burning blade was jammed through her heart and then her spine and she howled in anger as the sword blazed and the Star-Kindler burned. When she pulled the sword away the Star-Kindler was on her knees, flesh burned to a crisp but she was laughing, laughing.....laughing....

On her throne Sinmara's eyes opened and she returned to musing. Not long now, all the centuries of labor were coming to a crescendo. The last of the Great Rings she intended be made were being forged. Enough to draw all the kindred of Arda into this web, to bring them into the rebellion of the Eldar. She rose from the throne. She could feel it, with those strange things that flowed from that energy that had found its home. She could not command the spheres of the Valar, even if her power was now that of one of the Aratar in raw form. She did not want to, either.

All that was necessary was to call a hot gust of heat and to wield it in a fashion of magic that scientists of later years would have sneered at as defying physics and chemistry and several other things in the process. She could summon and make and unmake stars and wielded a blade of more destructive power than a thermonuclear bomb, and even if she had known more of science as the later generations in the time long after the Dawn-Age and the Hyborian Age were forgotten she would not have cared to use their terms or to think like them.

Her eyes blazed as she walked to her forge. Centuries of labor come round at last to a moment around which the fate of Arda would hinge. She would forge a Ring of her own, the theory understood, and in that power and in the primordial harmonics of the Music of the Ainur her power would be less enhanced further so much as her precision, and her mastery of the new things that had latched onto her and into her.

She spoke in the gutter Valarin of her youth:

_**One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them. One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness.....bind them.** _


	14. The Ring of Power:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sinmara of Muspeldor forges a Master Ring in Muspeldor, and the masks of centuries fall in a sudden moment.

THE FORGES OF MOUNT DOOM:

Eighty-one steps had she taken from her throne in the Obsidian Tower, as she had come to dub it to herself, and then up her road to Mount Doom. Eighty-one steps in her armor, knowing that her tools waited. Each measured and each level. She could have willed herself there in an instant but moments that hinged the destiny of a world did not deserve the simplicity of such a thing. Symbolism mattered. It had mattered when the Star-Kindler had drained the light of Yavanna's trees and then fired that single bolt of star-flame to briefly crack the cloud-cover over Valinor.

Symbolism mattered, as her flesh shifted from the starlight that illuminated whispy darkness to molten magma and the elemental fury of the volcano given flesh. It mattered as silence seemed to fall in her realm as the world held its breath, a silence that she did not know reached out into the lands of Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Even distant Andor felt the oppressive silence and a sudden and sticky heat that overawed the Valar-blessed weather. The first heat spell in Andor and those of the Blessed Land fell ill with effects that they did not understand.

Even in the Blessed Land where the sand was as the most precious jewels of the Great Land and where, even in the wake of the Darkening there was splendor and a hallowed element the breezes of Sulimo stilled, and that same heat buffeted it. Only the great Burnings of the Star-Kindler had matched this effect in the old days, but she was beyond the Doors. Those who knew how and why this was wept, then, bitter tears. For the last illusions of change had fallen. Even if she remained in denial to herself, she had become in the end the creature of the thing that raved and howled beyond the Doors and of her kindred.

To the doors of the forge and then within it, and she paused, at the Forge where the metal had become liquid.

She raised her right hand and around it formed a ball of flame and with it the primordial harmonics of the music of the Ainur, and to the inhabitants of Muspeldor it was akin to thunder and the howling gale and the wail of the child and many more things. Reality itself seemed to stretch too thin or became too thick, things were either immaterial and in a strange mist or hyper-real and prone to driving those who saw it thus to madness.

To the Forge she strode and then in nine steps she forged a Ring that would leave ruin and sorrow in its wake when on her finger and still moreso when off it, when the dream of a Ring that promised mastery of the world brought treachery and ruin and savagery in its wake, bodies pierced and bodies slain, mortals laid low by the fell conjurations she had worked and that she continued to work.

The hammer worked and the harmonics went within the metal, a thing that transcended the understandings of mortals and which echoed with each clang of the hammer like a bell to herald the end of time. In Muspeldor and even around it the Nine Thunders were points where the forging process, not entirely so in the way that mortals or even Elves would have done it, unfolded. Each of the Nine Thunders brought with it howls from the Star-Blooded and prayers in word and sword and broken bodies from the Star-Enthralled.

Nine Thunders echoed and then it was done, a Ring forged. It was superficially akin to the lesser Rings in shape, a mere band of what was gold, at one level, and gold with interwoven starlight in another. Around it flowed a script that moved like water and gleamed with a brilliant hue in the palm of she who had built it and gazed at it as if it were something.....precious. Beyond words. It was here. After all this time, it was here.

She had done it.

With her gestures and her motions transfixed she raised the Ring before her, the incantation upon it casting its light into and around the fires of the Volcano, and then lowered it to her finger and spoke in the gutter-Valarin she had begun to forge into a tongue to link the diverse cultures and species that knelt before the World-Destroyer as their Queen.

_**Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thratuluk, agh-ishi burzum krimpatul!** _

FORGES OF CELEBRIMBOR:

Celebrimbor heard those words as if they were right beside him.

Immediately he grasped that in the end the worries of the King and of Galadriel had been right, so horribly, truthfully right. 

He had trusted, at some level, even if he had tried to resist it, that the beautiful shining being whose body brought with her the droning hunger of the stars wanted good things, that even she like her kind could repent. But now there was a new Ring, a World-Destruction force to rival that of the quite unpleasant figure who had taken the name in the old days. The creature of the Star-Kindler had been terrifying then, but now she was stronger, far stronger than she had been and as the chieftain of the Maia she had been as the lesser Valar. Now she was as the greater and it was such a being who had somehow, most improbably, found power in magick that was far more deadly than anything of Mairon's make.

For his was a will bound by the decrees of the Oracle of the Allfather, the Lord of the Seven Winds, and would not be unleashed save when and as that Will allowed it in the Great Lands.

He muttered a name in the old Quenya of his youth:

_Moringotto._

A name that would not be used frequently but was the only one appropriate for the spirit of the....of the....of the _thing_ that had built that Ring and could now gaze where and as it willed. And so long as the Ring endured, he began to realize, she could, for in it was woven the power of Starlight that would make it addictive to Men and beyond that to Eldar, in the most improbable event that so terrifying a force could be brought low. 

RIVENDELL:

Kemenrod looked at his daughter, who was sparring and training with her brothers when the sudden wave of malice erupted outward and in that instance he removed his Ring from his finger, gasping with relief. There was a Power loose, now, mightier than anything could or should have been. It was not contained within a Vala in origin but one who had become monstrous and lost in the ruinous addiction of the everlasting darkness. It was a darkness that even in daylight snarled and rasped with the power and majesty of the dreaded things called the stars, and with that power unleashed his gaze turned much more sharply to his Arwen Amaren.

His daughter was going to need every bit of physical and metaphysical training she needed. The monster had already gone after his family a few times, how much worse could it be if-then he paused for a moment. A brief instinct to shield her had risen but if she truly was to fulfill the mistaken boasts of Luthien that would never do. It would be a long and a terrible road redeemed in the distant future by a reunion of family he could but distantly glimpse. A man haunted by the mistakes of a fallen kingdom, determined to wage a bitter war against an unstoppable force, and a fearful battle fought beneath the smog and the dense smokes of Mount Doom, with a sword that burned with a brilliant cold clear light of the Blessed Land and a being of fearful majesty with a sword meant to destroy worlds that in the end would not save its wielder.

And there, his daughter. Her role, essential, in a way he could not predict.

No, he could not shield her. It would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake and not just this world might burn from it. If she won she could summon her dreaded queen from beyond the Doors and then what? No. To save the world, his daughter's future would be mortgaged.

His eyes then shifted more discerningly to his sons. Then again, nothing in the prophecy said she and he had to do it alone, and while Arwen had inherited power from their Vardarin heritage, so had her brothers.....

ERYN HOLLIN:

The moment when the Great Enemy revealed herself at last smote Galadriel like that evening in the woods when the monster had attacked her, the filthy spawn of Ungoliant that had been slain by the dreadful Sword. No doubt Celebrimbor would be judging himself harshly but Galadriel cursed herself, too. At one level she had wanted to believe, to truly and sincerely believe that the monster could change. That damnation was not irrevocable. She too had erred, even if on the side of her kin, and if the Star-Kindler's abomination could be forgiven and could repent, then perhaps there was hope for her.

Not now. Not when a terrible force that had sought the power of the Star-Kindler but been rebuffed neither from nobility nor spite but from simply lacking the mindset to grasp that it was there and thus to allow it ingress had risen with the Ring that had gone on that finger. Hers was removed and she shuddered, a weeping breath echoing from her, her son looking at her with concern. 

"Mother?" His question was soft, but she couldn't quite respond. Her dreams, half-formed and unspoken by any save herself, were destroyed. She wiped the tears then stared in determination. The World-Destroyer had risen at last, and there was only destiny now. Destiny, and a war more terrible than anything that had ever been imagined or would ever be.

Now, though, she knew the strangeness of those nightmares that in retrospect were the most clear visions of a harsh and bloody future. A future where Gil-Galad's Kingdom of Hithlum burned....

MUSPELDOR:

The Queen of the World-Destroyers stood at the top of her tower, looking at the full weight of vast gathered armies. Legions of Jotnar, and of the Eldar. Countless teeming hordes of Men and a few of the Serpent-Creatures of Valusia. Even a few, a very few, Dwarf-Lords and their armies.

She raised Nightfall and it burned as a torch before them and spoke the words that would herald the onset of a new and a terrible war.

_**I go to Hithlum to lay the very stronghold of the King of the Elves low. Then, my soldiers, we shall march. Let Arda burn, and let the Heavens weep in the face of the glory of what shall come forth with that burning and for it in all that I could wish!** _

_Sinmara Sinmara Sinmara!_

_Sinmara Sinmara Sinmara!_

_Sinmara Sinmara Sinmara!_

She was not the Star-Kindler's creation, and she did not need to be. Her face broke out into a vicious unnaturally wide grin. 

In a flash of light she seemed to vanish, and a pillar of fire traversed the skies heading straight for Hithlum, which had received warnings, frantic and worried from Galadriel and Celebrimbor and warnings from those two Quendi with that tone of voice, particularly in the realm of Thought, were not to be so lightly dismissed as the more foolish had said they could and should be. No. Not at all.

Fire was burning toward the north. War was coming.


	15. The Fall of Hithlum:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Destiny comes to Hithlum in fire and fury.

HITHLUM: 

In the Palace of Gil-Galad they could feel the oncoming presence of the force that was bearing down upon them. Nature did not and would never yield to Sinmara of Muspelheim in the way that it would have yielded to Melkor the Morgoth or Mairon Gorthaur, but that was not necessary. She had knowledge, which meant more than brute force, in spheres that she had not imagined. She had small tricks that she could wield and she did so. The air echoed with phantoms, with the screams of old battles and the smell of burning flesh, and the Quendi within the city were frozen with the memories of the colossal battles of the God-War, of the sight of the decaying and increasingly skeletal-yet-frenzied Star-Kindler.

Memories became real and a pillar of fire traversed the sky, the memories becoming more real as the pillar arrived and then descended in a trail of fire, landing near the palace.

From it strode a giant, four times the size of a Quendi clad in golden armor that enhanced her strength.

Moans of fear and horror echoed in the wake of her arrival, for now, at last, it was proven beyond all doubt that the old stories had _lied._ Even if suspicions had grown and grown the greater since the tale of Galadriel and other elements hinting at her survival, to see them so mercilessly confirmed near the outskirts of his palace was a blow that left the Quendi hovering near despair. She seemed bloated somewhat, swollen with a power that was not of her nature and the light in her eyes shone and thrummed with that soul-hunger that was the natural element of the stars. 

Her frame was vaguely akin to that of a woman or an Elf-maiden but taller, of a deep blackness veined with reddish-orange flames. All was akin to the life-blood of the Earth that boiled and bubbled up from it at times, save her eyes. They were stars, twin flames that hungered and sang with a chorus of terrible beauty. Upon the hand that drew the sword Nightfall from a scabbard still at her back there gleamed a single Ring that glowed with eldritch runes, the sword displaying its uncanny ability to grow in bulk and length to match the height of its wielder at the time.

**_You were right, in the end, not to trust me Gil-Galad Ereinion. I have always been the burner of the kingdom of the House of Hurin, she who dueled Mairon, herald of Melkor the Great King in the War of the Powers. You were right and it avails you nothing. Here, now, I am judgment and I am doom._ **

**_I am the scourge of Eru himself fallen from heaven, to burn your kingdom for the hubris and the folly of your peoples. If you had not committed such sins, he would not have sent me among you._ **

The ground became parched as the fires began to dance up the blade Nightfall, as she smiled. 

**_Do you know how my blade kills, King of the Grave? It commands the power of that invisible force that makes up all life, amplified by the nature of my m-of the Star-Kindler's light. It is World-Destruction, a simple concept with such profound and lovely layers made manifest. It burns the trees and the beasts as well as mortals, and it burns the souls such that even in Mandos your shriven soul sundered from its flesh shall carry its burns. Perhaps the Grave-King has found means to treat such burns, perhaps not. It matters not to me, for my blade deals the wounds. For your fallen soul, however...._ **

A horrid bass droning sound echoed from the blade and the ground cracked around it as she raised the blade above her in a salute and bellowed: 

**_No Gods! No Masters! And now, you burn!_ **

In a motion faster than he could have predicted or countered she flipped the blade such that the edge faced the ground and then held it there, suspended. Hope dawned for a moment among the Quendi as her eyes looked to the skies that there was a sign, some Eagle or Dragon come in the last moments to forestall the Doom in that blade.

Nothing came, the creature laughing at the sadism of inflicting the false hope, and then the blade impacted the ground and pulsed, its power burning outward in the first display of her newly enhanced strength.

An eerie light cracked through the ground, trails of fire extending outward, buildings catching on fire and Quendi and the odd Man or Woman that lived among them and even the few Dwarves that did in the path of the flames running as their bodies burned like torches, longing for death but not yet able to die. The light accelerated through the city at a speed fast enough that most affected by it were mercifully denied the awareness of what reached out for them and to them and burned with a brilliant and deadly eldritch hue. The light extended like the fingers of a monstrous hand and where her blade dug in near the palace was like a twisted mockery of a palm.

Gil-Galad looked at her in fear, holding his wife and the curve of her belly accentuated a last, desperate plea to the heart of the Enemy.

She simply curled her lip in a snarl and then the light pulsed again and erupted outward in a brilliant flash of light that devoured the city in the epicenter, the fingers and the hand rising and merging into a vast sphere of light that glowed like a second Sun with a brilliance that led to the brightness of the Noonday Dawn. She smiled and willed herself just outside the range of the blast as the light erupted outward and then the shockwave flattened the city and all life in the vicinity of Hithlum, only the carefully warded and shielded Havens just to the east obscured from her sight and its effects, as the newly arrived Mairon, sent in the wake of the building of the Ring by Melkor with the approval of Eru Illuvatar had shielded it just in time.

From the shockwave there rose a vast cloud like a toadstool, easily visible to both the dragons of Melkor and the Eagles of Manwe, and the effects in the ground brought the shuddering of the Earthquake across the world, flattening some villages that died alone and uncomprehending and creating the Ring of Flattened Trees around it.

As the smoke and the reek from Hithlum rose, Nightfall was placed back within its scabbard and Sinmara raised her hands before the destruction she created, inhaling its scent like a connoisseur of fine wines.

Hithlum burned and the vast armies of the South and the East were raised against the North and the West.

War had begun.

THE MENELTARMA, PALACE OF WESTERNESSE:

Tar-Minastir's people first knew of the cataclysm to the east when the oceans drew back, shaken by the impact of the tremendous forces unleashed in the Burning of Hithlum. The peoples of Numenor had never seen such a thing before, the ocean drawing back and fish and other things of the ocean flopping incomprehensibly on the shores. The foolish went out to see for themselves what lay beneath the depths of the ocean, knowing nothing at that time of what fate held for them and with them and what it meant. It took them a time, too, to grasp the nature of what began to move toward them like a mountain wading in the sea with a terrible roaring sound. 

It was no monster, and it would have been little comfort to them to realize that Ulmo and Osse and Uinen had done all they could to restrain it such that it was only a third of what could have been. The wave slammed into them with the merciless kick of a giant that had no malice behind it, only the inscrutable and terrible raw power of nature. For the first time the Gift of Men came to Numenor in colossal quantities, and in the failure, seemingly, of Ulmo, their patron, to save them, the first shadow of the Alkallabeth began to fall, though none knew it then and none dared speak aloud what began to lurk, and for a short time did so even in the heart of the Faithful.

Tar-Minastir would rebuild his kingdom, and in time, as news came of the terrible war with the Queen of Muspeldor, arisen like a terrible ghost of the Fallen and with her powers in turn, began to build a vast fleet equipped with the new and deadly modifications of old Quendi science. The monster in the East had struck first and drew first blood. The vengeance of the West would be terrible and it would be complete. And yet even at the swiftest will, it would take nearly a decade which in war is as a millennium before the fleet could sail to the East and to the Great Lands.


End file.
